I'll start this with an example of a truncating function:

sub trunc {
  my $max_words = shift or return '';
  my $text      = shift or return '';
  $max_words--;
  $text =~ /(.+?(?:\s.+?){$max_words})\s+[^\s]/ and return "$1...";
  return $text;
}
[download]

The purpose is simple: you want to show just the first $n words of a text? trunc($n, $text) will do the trick...

But not perfectly!

Issues:

• What if the $n'th word has punctuation after it?
• Suppose if the text contains more text between parentheses and you want to truncate before or after those, but not in the middle.

What I want is a standard text truncating function (by number of words or possible amount of characters) that I'd be able to use everywhere. There are probably other issues besides those two.

Anyone has personal code to do this to share? Or perhaps other issues with this code to point?

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