Question

EDIT 2:

I have just realised that my HTML is only displaying the artist & song, not the album which is why when I had

alert(album);

in there I was getting unexpected results. The jQuery trim is now working as expected.
Blush
Thank you for your answers which I will keep for other scripts.

I’m using JQuery to grab the last 10 songs played from a lastfm user and display them.

I would like to truncate the album names down to x characters and replace with …

The string is:

album = item.album['#text'];

and it is displayed here:

$current.find('[class=lfm_album]').append(album);

I have tried using:

var shortText = jQuery.trim(album).substring(0, 10)
    .split(" ").slice(0, -1).join(" ") + "...";

but it just displays the full album string and no amount of fiddling or javascript seems to work.

EDIT:

I have just tried

album = item.album['#text'];
alert(album);

to see what it thinks is there and I get some very results that don’t match any of the other strings produced by the script so really am stuck now!

The full script is as follows:

/*---------------
 * jQuery Last.Fm Plugin by Engage Interactive
 * Examples and documentation at: http://labs.engageinteractive.co.uk/lastfm/
 * Copyright (c) 2009 Engage Interactive
 * Version: 1.0 (10-JUN-2009)
 * Dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses:
 * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
 * http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
 * Requires: jQuery v1.3 or later
---------------*/

(function($){
    $.fn.lastFM = function(options) {

        var defaults = {
            number: 5,
            username: 'xxxxxxx',
            apikey: 'xxxxxxxx',
            artSize: 'medium',
            noart: 'images/noartwork.gif',
            onComplete: function(){}
        },
        settings = $.extend({}, defaults, options);

        var lastUrl = 'http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=user.getrecenttracks&user='+settings.username+'&api_key='+settings.apikey+'&limit='+settings.number+'&format=json&callback=?';
        var $this = $(this);

        var container = $this.html();

        $this.children(':first').remove();

        if(settings.artSize == 'small'){imgSize = 0}
        if(settings.artSize == 'medium'){imgSize = 1}
        if(settings.artSize == 'large'){imgSize = 2}

        this.each(function() {

            $.getJSON(lastUrl, function(data){ 
                $.each(data.recenttracks.track, function(i, item){

                    if(item.image[1]['#text'] == ''){
                        art = settings.noart;
                    }else{
                        art = stripslashes(item.image[imgSize]['#text']);
                    }

                    url = stripslashes(item.url);
                    song = item.name;
                    artist = item.artist['#text'];
                    album = item.album['#text'];
// this is the part where I try to truncate "album"
var shortText = $.trim(album).substring(0, 10)
    .split(" ").slice(0, -1).join(" ") + "...";




                    $this.append(container);

                    var $current = $this.children(':eq('+i+')');

                    $current.find('[class=lfm_song]').append(song);
                    $current.find('[class=lfm_artist]').append(artist);
                    //$current.find('[class=lfm_album]').append(album);
                    $current.find('[class=lfm_album]').append(shortText);
                    $current.find('[class=lfm_art]').append("<img src='"+art+"' alt='Artwork for "+album+"'/>");
                    $current.find('a').attr('href', url).attr('title', 'Listen to '+song+' on Last.FM').attr('target', '_blank');

                    //callback
                    if(i==(settings.number-1)){
                        settings.onComplete.call(this);
                    }

                });
            });
        });
    };

    //Clean up the URL's
    function stripslashes( str ) {   
        return (str+'').replace(/\0/g, '0').replace(/\\([\\'"])/g, '$1');
    }
})(jQuery);

thanks for your help.

Answer 1

If you’re trying to truncate the album/title by spaces after 10th character you can use the indexOf method

var album = "   This is the're long title of the album    ";

album = $.trim(album); //make sure to trim the album first
if (album.length > 10) {
  //the indexOf will return the position of the first space starting from the 10th
   alert(album.substring(0, album.indexOf(' ',10)) + "...");
}

Source MDN