Re: Smart Substrings

I'm not sure I like any of the solutions yet offered (can you tell?) so I whipped this up:

sub shorten {
  local $_ = shift;
  my $len  = shift;
  my $pos;
  
  return $_ if $len >= length;

  $len -= 3;
  $pos = pos while /\w(?=\s)/g && $len >= pos;
  $pos ||= $len;
  substr($_, 0, $pos)."...";
}

print shorten("misunderestimate", 15), "\n";
print shorten("all work and no play makes MeowChow a dull boy", 15), "
+\n";
print shorten("imapirateiamiam", 15), "\n";
[download]

If you don't care about matching multiple spaces or about matching tabs, I would rewrite the second and third-to-last lines in the sub as follows (which would essentially make it bbfu's solution):

  $pos = rindex $_, " ", $len;
  $pos = $len if $pos < 0;
[download]

This would make a good Golf contest by the way (hint, hint)...

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

Comment on Re: Smart Substrings Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Smart Substrings by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Apr 03, 2001 at 09:00 UTC
LOL :) "Remember, just say NO to regex (when simpler functions will do)". - MeowChow sorry, couldn't resist it :) cLive ;-)	[reply]
Re: Re: Smart Substrings by MeowChow (Vicar) on Apr 03, 2001 at 09:21 UTC
I knew this would be coming... Yes, I did resort to a regex, but only because of two exceptional cases (extra spaces and tabs). Not knowing the poster's requirements in this regard, I wrote something that would handle these cases. The non-regex solution is still a much better fit to this problem, and the regex that I did use was kept fairly simple. It would even have been `/\w\s\/`, but I chose to simplify the indexing arithmetic instead. Hmm... all this backtracking, I'm beginning to sound like a regex myself :) MeowChow s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print	[reply] [d/l]