CSS Ellipsis Beginning of String
I was incredibly happy when CSS text-overflow: ellipsis (married with fixed width and overflow: hidden was introduced to the CSS spec and browsers; the feature allowed us to stop trying to marry JavaScript width calculation with string width calculation and truncation. CSS ellipsis was also very friendly to accessibility.
The CSS text-overflow: ellipsis feature is great but is essentially meant to ellipsize strings only at the end; what if we want to ellipsize the beginning of a screen? The use case is fairly reasonable: think displaying a file path -- many times the directory for a set of files is the same, in which case you'd want to display the end of the string, not the beginning.
Let me show you a trick for ellipsis at the begging of the string!
The CSS
Showing an ellipsis at the front of a string is mostly the same as ellipsis at the end, only with one simple trick:
.ellipsize-left {
/* Standard CSS ellipsis */
white-space: nowrap;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
width: 200px;
/* Beginning of string */
direction: rtl;
text-align: left;
}
To add an ellipsis at the beginning of a string, use RTL and and text-align to clip the beginning of the string!
Playing RTL off of text-align is a genius way to get the desired effect of CSS ellipsis at the beginning of an element or string. It would be great for the CSS spec to implement a more robust ellipsis system but, for now, I worship amazing CSS tricks like this!
![Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us]()
Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...
![CSS 3D Folding Animation]()
Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...
![MooTools FontChecker Plugin]()
There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools.
The MooTools...
![AJAX For Evil: Spyjax with jQuery]()
Last year I wrote a popular post titled AJAX For Evil: Spyjax when I described a technique called "Spyjax":
Spyjax, as I know it, is taking information from the user's computer for your own use — specifically their browsing habits. By using CSS and JavaScript, I...
The CSS spec seems to recommend against using the
directionproperty on web pages:https://drafts.csswg.org/css-writing-modes-3/#direction
Happy to have helped!
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9793473/text-overflow-ellipsis-on-left-side/9793669#9793669
http://jsfiddle.net/yak613/fhr2s10c/
This seems kind of strange. Where is the extra slash coming from?
This trick seems to be broken for Safari which still truncates from the back then appends the ellipsis to the front.
Chrome/FF: 12345 => …345
Safari: 12345 => …123
For anyone having issues with symbols, like the plus sign in international phone numbers, add this:
unicode-bidi: plaintext;
If anyone dealing with multiline strings to truncate i recommend using the cuttr.js (https://github.com/d-e-v-s-k/cuttr-js) library ;)
Just in case anyone else runs into this… I had an issue where if the text contained punctuation, adding
moved the punctuation marks to the beginning of the text. I solved this by appending the unicode character to the end of the string with an :after
.ellipsize-left { /* Standard CSS ellipsis */ white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; width: 200px; /* Beginning of string */ direction: rtl; text-align: left; } .ellipsize-left:after { content: '\200E' }