Applying an ellipsis to multiline text [duplicate]

Answer 1

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;
}

  
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.