How to truncate text in Ruby on Rails

4 comments made

Chris Kampmeier commented on 22 Jan 07 at 20:40

You’d probably be happier with something like this, which will cut off text at a word boundary. You can put it in your application helper to use it in all your views.

def snippet(thought)
wordcount = 10
thought.split[0..(wordcount-1)].join(” “) + (thought.split.size > wordcount ? ”...” : ””)
end

Byron Bowerman commented on 30 Nov 07 at 16:53

@Chris thanks, I’m gunna use this. However, I modified it so that the wordcount is passable as a parameter:

def snippet(thought, wordcount) thought.split[0..(wordcount-1)].join(" ") +(thought.split.size > wordcount ? "..." : "") end

Also, just an fyi, when I pasted your code into Textmate it preserved the fancy quotes, which gave me about 30 seconds of WTF?

lou commented on 06 Dec 07 at 21:42

Try this one out, the number in brackets is the number of chars to match:

thought.gsub(/^(.{10}[\w.])(.)/) {$2.empty? ? $1 : $1 + ’...’}

It doesn’t break words and adds ’...’ if necessary. Check out www.golark.com and click submit to really be impressed with the power of regex.

lou commented on 06 Dec 07 at 21:46

Great, it took the asterisks out. Replace the a’s in the following string with asterisks:

thought.gsub(/^(.{10}[\w.]a)(.a)/) {$2.empty? ? $1 : $1 + ’...’}