Cut off text in a div if it exceeds set width?

Question

On a website I am working on users can add a heading to a section of a page.A simple example:

M11-001 - loss of container and goods from Manchester

With some headings the content can be quite in-depth. In reality, for the heading at least, this content isn't always needed. The first few words would suffice to differentiate between records.

I could just set overflow:hidden to the div and ruthlessly cut of anything outside of the set width.

I would prefer to add ... To the end. Like so:

M11-001 - loss of container...

So three full-stops would be added after either X width or X characters.

Is this possible with CSS, or maybe JavaScript?

Solution

Something like this? http://www.quirksmode.org/css/textoverflow.html

Text-Overflow

The text-overflow declaration allows you to deal with clipped text: that is, text that does not fit into its box. The ellipsis value causes three periods to be appended to the text.

Comments

[pimvdb]

An advantage is that copied text does not include the ... but rather the complete text.

[NakedBrunch]

Great. Is there anything else you need to mark this question as "answered"?

[Graham T]

Amazing! Had 5+ lines to handle this with substring and concatenations. Very smooth

[Robin]

Work perfectly, white-space: nowrap; overflow:hidden;text-overflow: ellipsis; .

[daniel rubambura]

For multi-line text, sometimes you may need to cut off only last line exceeding text. I found a solution here for that particular case. medium.com/@elad/trimming-multi-lines-in-css-5ae59d5e6d84