Re: In search of a better way to trim string length

[davido]

This snippet uses a pure regexp approach to breaking a string up into stringlets of no more than 'n' length, broken on the first whitespace before 'n', OR a hard break at 'n' characters if there is no preceeding whitespace on which to break. Not sure if this is what you're after, but it seems to be a start in the right direction. If you simply want to crop at 'n' or less (depending on whitespace), remove the /g modifier and capture only the first stringlet.

use strict;
use warnings;

while ( my $string = <DATA> ) {
    chomp $string;
    my ( @stringlets ) = $string =~ 
        m/(?:.{0,40}(?:\s|$))|(?:\S{40})/gs;
    print "$_\n" foreach @stringlets;
    print "\n\n";
}

__DATA__
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
Nowisthetimeforallgoodmentocometotheaidoftheircountry.

Applying the "..." elipses is trivial at this point.

I hope this helps... it's late, I may have misread the question. ;)

[kiat]

Thanks, Dave!

I ran your code as is, but it doesn't quite give me the reuslts I was expecting. Maybe I'm missing something?

[davido]

Maybe I'm missing something?

Only that I was just providing a starting point to illustrate a method. I figured you would tweak it to meet your needs. But in fairness, I should have provided an answer that produced exactly what you were looking for. I've modified my answer to do what I think your question was asking, and will paste it below...

The problem with my original (I think) was that it broke your original string into substrings of 'n' characters. What you were looking for was simply truncation, with trailing '...' elipses. Here ya go...

use strict;
use warnings;

my $len = 40;
print "0123456789012345678901234567890123456789\n";
while ( my $string = <DATA> ) {
    chomp $string;
    $string =~ 
        s/((?:.{0,$len}(?=\s|$))|(?:\S{$len}))(?:.+$)?/$1.../s;
    print "$string\n";
}

__DATA__
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
Nowisthetimeforallgoodmentocometotheaidoftheircountry.

Hope this helps.