How to position HTML input cursor at beginning of centered placeholder

Question

How can I position the cursor to be at the beginning of the placeholder (not the beginning of the input field) instead of the middle, while still keeping my placeholder text centered?

<input type="text" name="input_query" id="input_query" autofocus style="text-align: center; width: 100%" placeholder="Describe what's happening in your photo" autocomplete="off"/>

Answer 1

Use ::placeholder to apply CSS to the placeholder only:

input {
  width: 100%
}
input::placeholder {
  text-align: center;
}

<input type="text" autofocus placeholder="Describe what's happening in your photo" autocomplete="off"/>

If you want the cursor to appear at the beginning of the placeholder, you can do something similar, though it's pretty weird and isn't centered once the user starts typing:

input {
  width: 65%;
  padding-left: 35%;
}

<input type="text" autofocus placeholder="Describe what's happening in your photo" autocomplete="off"/>