Question

Given a title and a max_length, what would be the best way to shorten the title? The following is what I had in mind:

def shorten_title(title, max_length):
    if len(title) > max_length:
        split_title = title.split()
        length = len(title)
        n = 1
        while length > max_length:
            shortened_title = split_title[:length(split_title)-n]
            n+=1
        return shortened_title
    else:
        return title

Answer 1

>>> shorten_title = lambda x, y: x[:x.rindex(' ', 0, y)]
>>> shorten_title('Shorten title to a certain length', 20)
'Shorten title to a'

That should be enough if breaking on a space is all you need. Otherwise, there are several other posts on more complex methods, like: Truncate a string without ending in the middle of a word .

Update to address comment from okm:

To handle edge cases, like finding no spaces before max_length, address them explicitly:

def shorten_title2(x, y):
    if len(x) <= y:
        return x
    elif ' ' not in x[:y]:                                          
        return x[:y]
    else:
        return x[:x.rindex(' ', 0, y + 1)]