Truncate String to the First N Words

Truncate string to keep the first n words

This code truncates the text to keep the first n words, while keeping the rest of the text unchanged.

For example, you want to restrict users from typing/pasting too many words of text; you don't want to be changing what they typed aside from truncating.

var words = text.split(/(?=\s)/gi);
var indexToStop = words.length;
var count = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < words.length && count <= n; i++) {
    if (words[i].trim() != "") {
        if (++count > n)
            indexToStop = i;
    }
}
var truncated = words.slice(0, indexToStop).join('');

Truncate string to the first n words

n = 3
str = "your long    long   input string or whatever"
str.split[0...n].join(' ')
 => "your long long"

str.split[0...n] # note that there are three dots, which excludes n
 => ["your", "long", "long"]

How to truncate a string after n words in Java?

I found a way to do it using the java.text.BreakIterator class:

private static String truncateAfterWords(int n, String s) {
    if (s == null) return null;
    BreakIterator wb = BreakIterator.getWordInstance();
    wb.setText(s);
    int pos = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < n && pos != BreakIterator.DONE && pos < s.length();) {
        if (Character.isLetter(s.codePointAt(pos))) i++;
        pos = wb.next();
    }
    if (pos == BreakIterator.DONE || pos >= s.length()) return s;
    return s.substring(0, pos);
}

Truncate character strings after first N characters

There is already a packaged function for this operation. Try str_trunc() from the stringr package, setting the width to 13 (10 chars + 3 dots).

stringr::str_trunc(a, 13)
# [1] "AMS"           "CCD"           "TCGGCKGTPG..." "NOK"           
# [5] "THIS IS A ..." "JSQU909LPPLU" 

Truncate a string to first n characters of a string and add three dots if any characters are removed

//The simple version for 10 Characters from the beginning of the string
$string = substr($string,0,10).'...';

Update:

Based on suggestion for checking length (and also ensuring similar lengths on trimmed and untrimmed strings):

$string = (strlen($string) > 13) ? substr($string,0,10).'...' : $string;

So you will get a string of max 13 characters; either 13 (or less) normal characters or 10 characters followed by '...'

Update 2:

Or as function:

function truncate($string, $length, $dots = "...") {
    return (strlen($string) > $length) ? substr($string, 0, $length - strlen($dots)) . $dots : $string;
}

Update 3:

It's been a while since I wrote this answer and I don't actually use this code any more. I prefer this function which prevents breaking the string in the middle of a word using the wordwrap function:

function truncate($string,$length=100,$append="…") {
  $string = trim($string);

  if(strlen($string) > $length) {
    $string = wordwrap($string, $length);
    $string = explode("\n", $string, 2);
    $string = $string[0] . $append;
  }

  return $string;
}

How can I truncate a string to the first 20 words in PHP?

function limit_text($text, $limit) {
    if (str_word_count($text, 0) > $limit) {
        $words = str_word_count($text, 2);
        $pos   = array_keys($words);
        $text  = substr($text, 0, $pos[$limit]) . '...';
    }
    return $text;
}

echo limit_text('Hello here is a long sentence that will be truncated by the', 5);

Outputs:

Hello here is a long ...

Shorten string without cutting words in JavaScript

If I understand correctly, you want to shorten a string to a certain length (e.g. shorten "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to, say, 6 characters without cutting off any word).

If this is the case, you can try something like the following:

var yourString = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"; //replace with your string.
var maxLength = 6 // maximum number of characters to extract

//trim the string to the maximum length
var trimmedString = yourString.substr(0, maxLength);

//re-trim if we are in the middle of a word
trimmedString = trimmedString.substr(0, Math.min(trimmedString.length, trimmedString.lastIndexOf(" ")))

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