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...
![Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide]()
Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...
![Unicode CSS Classes]()
CSS class name structure and consistency is really important; some developers camelcase classnames, others use dashes, and others use underscores. One thing I've learned when toying around by HTML and CSS class names is that you can actually use unicode symbols and icons as classnames.
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos II]()
Hey everyone! Before we get started, I just want to say it's damn hard to pick this few favorites on CodePen. Not because, as a co-founder of CodePen, I feel like a dad picking which kid he likes best (RUDE). But because there is just so...
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' }