Question

I have the following function which accepts text and a word count and if the number of words in the text exceeded the word-count it gets truncated with an ellipsis.

#Truncate the passed text. Used for headlines and such
  def snippet(thought, wordcount)
    thought.split[0..(wordcount-1)].join(" ") + (thought.split.size > wordcount ? "..." : "")
  end 

However what this function doesn’t take into account is extremely long words, for instance…

“Helloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
world!”

I was wondering if there’s a better way to approach what I’m trying to do so it takes both word count and text size into consideration in an efficient way.

Answer 1

Is this a Rails project?

Why not use the following helper:

truncate("Once upon a time in a world far far away", :length => 17)

If not, just reuse the code.