How can I split a line on word boundaries closest to a certain length?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've got a string of undertermined length, which will contain text with embedded newlines. I'd like to split this string into chunks of no more than 140 characters (but splitting on a word boundry, so as to not cut words apart). Ideally, I'd like to be left with an array containing the split strings.

Comment on How can I split a line on word boundaries closest to a certain length?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How can I split a line close to a certain length, but on a word boundary? by poznick (Initiate) on Apr 25, 2000 at 02:07 UTC
and true to the perl motto, here's yet another (much simpler) way to do it: @text = $messagebody =~ /(.{1,140}\W)/gms;	[reply]
Re: How can I split a line close to a certain length, but on a word boundary? by poznick (Initiate) on Apr 24, 2000 at 21:41 UTC
I ended up using: $rest = $messagebody; @text=(); while($rest ne '') { $rest =~ /(.{1,140}\W)/ms; push @text, $1; $rest = $'; } Text::Wrap doesn't provide the desired behavior, unless I were to do a tr/// to translate all the newlines into some strange character, do the wrap, and then tr the strange characters back to newlines. This way seemed a little cleaner.	[reply]
Re: How can I split a line close to a certain length, but on a word boundary? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 21, 2000 at 20:12 UTC
The Text::Wrap module might prove useful to you. Your code might look like this: `use Text::Wrap qw(wrap 140 'wrap'); @strings = split/\n\n/, wrap($text);` [download]	[reply] [d/l]