Applying an ellipsis to multiline text [duplicate]

Answer 1

My solution that works for me for multiline ellipsis:

.crd-para {
    color: $txt-clr-main;
    line-height: 2rem;
    font-weight: 600;
    margin-bottom: 1rem !important;
    overflow: hidden;

    span::after {
        content: "...";
        padding-left: 0.125rem;
    }
}

Answer 2

After many tries, I finally ended up with a mixed js / css to handle multiline and single line overflows.

CSS3 code:

.forcewrap { // single line ellipsis
  -ms-text-overflow: ellipsis;
  -o-text-overflow: ellipsis;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
  overflow: hidden;
  -moz-binding: url( 'bindings.xml#ellipsis' );
  white-space: nowrap;
  display: block;
  max-width: 95%; // spare space for ellipsis
}

.forcewrap.multiline {
  line-height: 1.2em;  // my line spacing 
  max-height: 3.6em;   // 3 lines
  white-space: normal;
}

.manual-ellipsis:after {
  content: "\02026";      // '...'
  position: absolute;     // parent container must be position: relative
  right: 10px;            // typical padding around my text
  bottom: 10px;           // same reason as above
  padding-left: 5px;      // spare some space before ellipsis
  background-color: #fff; // hide text behind
}

and I simply check with js code for overflows on divs, like this:

function handleMultilineOverflow(div) {
    // get actual element that is overflowing, an anchor 'a' in my case
    var element = $(div).find('a'); 
    // don't know why but must get scrollHeight by jquery for anchors
    if ($(element).innerHeight() < $(element).prop('scrollHeight')) {
        $(element).addClass('manual-ellipsis');
    }
}

Usage example in html:

<div class="towrap">
  <h4>
    <a class="forcewrap multiline" href="/some/ref">Very long text</a>
  </h4>
</div>

Answer 3

After looking all over the internet and trying a lot of these options, the only way to make sure that it is covered correctly with support for i.e is through javascript, i created a loop function to go over post items that require multi line truncation.

*note i used Jquery, and requires your post__items class to have a fixed max-height.

// loop over post items
$('.post__items').each(function(){
    var textArray = $(this).text().split(' ');
    while($(this).prop('scrollHeight') > $(this).prop('offsetHeight')) {
        textArray.pop();
        $(this).text(textArray.join(' ') + '...');
     }
});

Answer 4

Unfortunately no with current state of affairs in CSS.

Ellipsis rendering has prerequisite white-space:nowrap that effectively means: ellipsis are drawn on single line text containers only.

Answer 5

Pros:
+ Cross browser (IE11, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.)
+ Most natural looking

Cons:
- Adds lots of extra elements to the DOM

I wasn't satisfied with any of the workarounds I had seen. Most of them use line-clamp which is currently only supported in webkit. So I played around with it until I came up with a solution. This pure javascript solution should be compatible with IE10 and greater and all modern browsers. This is untested outside of the stackoverflow example space below.

I think this is a good solution. The one big caveat is that it creates a span for each word inside the container, which will impact layout performance, so your mileage may vary.

//This is designed to be run on page load, but if you wanted you could put all of this in a function and addEventListener and call it whenever the container is resized.
var $container = document.querySelector('.ellipses-container');

//optional - show the full text on hover with a simple title attribute
$container.title = $container.textContent.trim();

$container.textContent.trim().split(' ').some(function (word) {
  //create a span for each word and append it to the container
  var newWordSpan = document.createElement('span');
  newWordSpan.textContent = word;
  $container.appendChild(newWordSpan);
  
  if (newWordSpan.getBoundingClientRect().bottom > $container.getBoundingClientRect().bottom) {
    //it gets into this block for the first element that has part of itself below the bottom of the container
    //get the last visible element
    var containerChildNodes = $container.childNodes;
    var lastVisibleElement = containerChildNodes[containerChildNodes.length - 2];
    
    //replace this final span with the ellipsis character
    newWordSpan.textContent = '\u2026';
    
    //if the last visible word ended very near the end of the line the ellipsis will have wrapped to the next line, so we need to remove letters from the last visible word
    while (lastVisibleElement.textContent != "" && newWordSpan.getBoundingClientRect().bottom > $container.getBoundingClientRect().bottom) {
      lastVisibleElement.style.marginRight = 0;
      lastVisibleElement.textContent = lastVisibleElement.textContent.slice(0, -1);
    }
    
    //using .some() so that we can short circuit at this point and no more spans will be added
    return true;
  }
});

.multi-line-container {
  border: 1px solid lightgrey;
  padding: 4px;
  height: 150px;
  width: 300px;
}

.ellipses-container {
  display: inline-flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  justify-content: flex-start;
  align-content: flex-start; /* optionally use align-content:stretch, the default, if you don't like the extra space at the bottom of the box if there's a half-line gap */
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}

.ellipses-container > span {
  flex: 0 0 auto;
  margin-right: .25em;
}

.text-body {
  display: none;
}

<div class="multi-line-container ellipses-container">
  <div class="text-body ellipses-text">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque luctus ut massa eget porttitor. Nulla a eros sit amet ex scelerisque iaculis nec vitae turpis. Sed pharetra tincidunt ante, in mollis turpis consectetur at. Praesent venenatis pulvinar lectus, at tincidunt nunc finibus non. Duis tortor lectus, elementum faucibus bibendum vitae, egestas bibendum ex. Maecenas vitae augue vitae dui condimentum imperdiet sit amet mattis quam. Duis eleifend scelerisque magna sed imperdiet. Mauris tempus rutrum metus, a ullamcorper erat fringilla a. Suspendisse potenti. Praesent et mi enim. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
  </div>
</div>

Answer 6

This man have the best solution. Only css:

.multiline-ellipsis {
    display: block;
    display: -webkit-box;
    max-width: 400px;
    height: 109.2px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    font-size: 26px;
    line-height: 1.4;
    -webkit-line-clamp: 3;
    -webkit-box-orient: vertical;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}