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!
![Conquering Impostor Syndrome]()
Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense. I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions. I've even caught myself reading the post...
![Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations]()
Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...
![Display Images as Grayscale with CSS Filters]()
CSS filters aren't yet widely supported but they are indeed impressive and a modern need for web imagery. CSS filters allow you to modify the display of images in a variety of ways, one of those ways being displaying images as grayscale.
Doing so requires the...
![Sexy Opacity Animation with MooTools or jQuery]()
A big part of the sexiness that is Apple software is Apple's use of opacity. Like seemingly every other Apple user interface technique, it needs to be ported to the web (</fanboy>). I've put together an example of a sexy opacity animation technique...
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' }