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!
![An Interview with Eric Meyer]()
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...
![Animating CSS3 Transforms with MooTools Fx]()
![Link Nudging with CSS3 Animations]()
One of the more popular and simple effects I've featured on this blog over the past year has been linking nudging. I've created this effect with three flavors of JavaScript: MooTools, jQuery, and even the Dojo Toolkit. Luckily CSS3 (almost) allows us to ditch...
![Sexy Album Art with MooTools or jQuery]()
The way that album information displays is usually insanely boring. Music is supposed to be fun and moving, right? Luckily MooTools and jQuery allow us to communicate that creativity on the web.
The XHTML
A few structure DIVs and the album information.
The CSS
The CSS...
The CSS spec seems to recommend against using the
direction
property 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 ;)