Re: How do I truncate a string while preserving words?

[Tomte]

Try

$string =~ s/^(.{0,$maxlength})\b.*$/$1.../s;

that should work as expected (at least as far as the presented code goes...).

Edit: explanation: you can ommit the upper bound, but not the lower bound, as you did. From perlre:

     {n}?   Match exactly n times
     {n,}?  Match at least n times
     {n,m}? Match at least n but not more than m times

and you have to match the rest of the input (.*$) for it to be replaced too - otherwise you would simply insert the ellipsis (...) without truncating the input.

[Cap'n Steve]

Darn it, I swear I remember being able to omit the minimum number of matches. I wonder what it was doing with my regular expression since it didn't issue a warning. Thanks for pointing out the other error, too, I hadn't even thought about that yet.