javascript - Text-overflow ellipsis on left side

Question

I have a list of paths (for lack of a better word, maybe bread crumb trails describes them better). Some of the values are too long to display in their parent so I'm using text-overflow: ellipsis. The problem is that the important information is on the right, so I'd like the ellipsis to appear on the left. Something like this this ascii art:

----------------------------
|first > second > third    |
|...second > third > fourth|
|...fifth > sixth > seventh|
----------------------------

Notice that the first row is short enough so it remains left aligned, but the other two are too long so the ellipsis appears on the left hand side.

I'd prefer a CSS only solution, but JS is fine if it can't be avoided. It's ok if the solution only works in Firefox and Chrome.

EDIT: At this point I'm looking for a work around for the bugs in Chrome that prevent it from rendering properly when a document is mixed RTL and LTR. That was all I really needed from the outset, I just didn't realize it.

Answer 1

How about something like this jsFiddle? It uses the direction, text-align, and text-overflow to get the ellipsis on the left. According to MDN, there may be the possibility of specifying the ellipsis on the left in the future with the left-overflow-type value however it's considered to still be experimental.

p {
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
  /* "overflow" value must be different from "visible" */
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
  width: 170px;
  border: 1px solid #999;
  direction: rtl;
  text-align: left;
}

<p>first > second > third<br /> second > third > fourth > fifth > sixth<br /> fifth > sixth > seventh > eighth > ninth</p>?