in reply to How do I truncate a string while preserving words?

What about the standard module Text:: Wrap?

Here's a promising-sounding snippet from its docs:

Text::Wrap::wrap() is a very simple paragraph formatter. It formats a single paragraph at a time by breaking lines at word boundaries.

Or if that's not sufficient, Text::Autoformat is capable of more complex things.

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Re^2: How do I truncate a string while preserving words?
by Cap'n Steve (Friar) on May 12, 2007 at 08:02 UTC
    Maybe I read it wrong, but it looks like those modules are geared toward displaying all the text, just divided into lines. I wanted to only display the first part, kind of like a preview.
[reply]
      Try Text::Autformat and split to get the first line. 
      use strict;
use warnings;

use Text::Autoformat;

my $string = 'A lengthy text with more than xxx characters to demonstr
+ate truncate';


print "Before: $string\n";
print 'Length: ' , length($string) , "\n";

my $truncated  = &truncate($string,20);


print "After: $truncated\n";
print 'Length: ' , length($truncated) , "\n";

###########################################################
sub truncate {
    my $string = shift @_;
    my $length = 75; 
    $length = shift if @_;
    

    $string = autoformat($string, {     left  => 0,
                                      right => $length ,
                                      widow => 0,
                                 });
        ($string) = split(/\n/,$string); # Just the first element
        
        return $string;
} ##
###########################################################

      [download]
      Just my two cents. Hope this helps
[reply]
[d/l]

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