How to split a string into two lines, intelligently

[kweise]

Hi all, I need to split a user entered string into two lines, the first containing 50 or less characters, the second the remainder. I want to split the string on a space, so that the two lines don't split in the middle of a word.
As a shorter example "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" into:
The quick brown fox jumped
over the lazy dog

Not breaking the string in the middle of a word. But the string will be different each time, depending on what the user entered. Thanks for any help!!

[almut]

If you just want to get it working (and are not specifically interested in the learning experience per se), you might want to consider using Text::Wrap :)

[ig]

To get a little closer to your objective, you might try one of the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
use strict;

my $string = "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog";

# Using a regular expression
$string =~ m/(.{0,50}\s)(.*)/;
print "$1\n$2\n";

# Using rindex() and substr()
my $pos = rindex($string, ' ', 50);
print substr($string,0,$pos) . "\n" . substr($string,$pos+1) . "\n";

The regular expression will break the line on any whitespace (space, tab, etc.) but rindex will break only on a space character.

[kweise]

Thanks! The regex worked great, that's still my weak point, even when working in unix/linux.

[RMGir]

"Holy homework, Batman!"

What you're looking for is a way to search a string and replace, from the start of a string, a space that's as many as 50 characters in with a newline.

Now, if only perl had a mechanism to make this simple. And if only this mechanism had something called "quantifiers" you could use to specify your limit! Wouldn't that be nice?

Please, click on the link above and read the perlre manpage. I'm going to post an answer behind spoiler space, but you'll do better in the long run if you read and understand the fine manual.

$text=~s{^          # starting at the beginning of the string
          (.{1,50}) # capture up to 50 characters
          \s        # followed by a space
        }
        {$1\n}x;     # and replace it with what you captured followed 
+by a newline

[kweise]

Not homework, just a perl beginner, trying to take user input from our company home page and get it printed nicely. At least I figured out how to use PDF::API2 myself. ;-)

[RMGir]

Cool.

In that case, I think almut's suggestion is probably best: use Text::Wrap.

[GrandFather]

My first PerlMonks node provided a solution to a problem very like this one. If you twiddle the values in the quantifier and remove the /g switch then you have the solution you are probably looking for.

See perlretut, perlre and perlreref for more regular expression goodness.

[Andrew Coolman]

This one might work if the characters are separated by spaces:

@arr = split (/\s/,$string);
$part1 = ();
$part2 = ();
$len = 0;
while (($len += 1 + length($part = shift @arr)) < 50)
{
  $part1 .= "$part ";
}
$part2 = join(' ', @arr);


Regards,

[JavaFan]

Assuming the first word doesn't consist of more than 50 characters (in which case, no solution is possible), a simple

    s/\s/\n/;

will do. The first line will not be more than 50 characters, and the remainder will be in te second line.

It's not the solution that makes the longest first string possible with the given constraints, but then, you weren't asking for it.