http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=375662


in reply to In search of a better way to trim string

Sorry if this is a bit late, FWIW...

1) Most of the replies published (well, those that work :-) truncate strings that are exactly of the desired length, while your original version keeps these intact. Test case:

my $str = trim_length ( 'this sentence is 30 signs long', 30 );

If you use eg BrowserUK's code, this is easy to fix: just change

return $str if length $str < $n;

to:

return $str if length $str <= $n;

2) It might be an idea to strip off trailing whitespace, in order to avoid adding ' ...' to the end of a message that is essentially complete. My own solution, again FWIW, would be

sub trim_length { my ( $str, $desired_len ) = @_; $str =~ s/\s+$//; # Strip trailing whitespace return $str if length $str <= $desired_len; return sprintf "%.${desired_len}s ...", substr $str, 0, ( rindex $str, ' ', $desired_len ); }

dave