Make text overflow according to width of top sibling text

February 13, 2023

I would like to solve this with CSS only (if possible) and can’t seem to find the solution. Let’s say I have a simple component as such:

<div class='container'>
    <h1 class='title'>This is a long title</h1>
    <div class='subtitle'>explanation with width longer than the title</div>
</div>

Which renders something like this (assuming the container is a column flexbox):

This is a long title
explanation with width longer than the title

I would like it to render:

This is a long title
explanation with
width longer than
the title

I need the second child element’s max-width to match the width of the title element. Is there a way to do this with flex or grid?

>Solution :

You can achieve that by following:

<div class='container'>
    <h1 class='title'>This is a long title</h1>
    <span class='subtitle'>explanation with width longer than the title text</span>
</div>

.title {
  width: fit-content;
  display: inline-block;
}

.subtitle {
  position: static;
  white-space: break-spaces;
}

.container {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  width: min-content;
  white-space: nowrap;
  position: relative;
}

Working demo: https://codepen.io/wajeshubham/pen/vYzBRej