I use a truncate method to truncate a string in my site. I truncate with the code:
truncate(auto_link(textilize(post.content)), :length => 140)
This truncation truncates the post content, but there is a problem with the content contains links. EG the post content is:
<p>Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo
<a href="http://www.yahoo.com">Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo
Yahoo </a> Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google <a
href="http://www.google.com"> Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google
</a><br></p>
In this case, the all the html tags and the links get counted in the character count by truncate method, rather than the truncate method counting the characters that a viewer would actually see:
Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo
Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo (etc..)
Is there any work around here for the truncation method?
EDIT: new example to clear up ambiguities:
Users post their posts in plain text, and are allow to use textile for some formatting. In terms of posting links, I allow users to (a) paste plain urls (http://www.site.com, http://www.site.com, etc..), (b) use textile syntax which converts “the click me text”:http://www.example.com to the click me text or take their time to embed links in html form.
I want a page that has snippets of a person’s posts to show only the first, say, 140 characters of their post. But I want this to be 140 characters of the text that a reader would see. In other words, let’s say a user’s post starts as:
Today I went to the market to pick up some fruit. "At the market there was this awesome
fruit display!":http://www.externalsite.com/picture.jpg Definitely want to go back
tomorrow!
This will be converted by textilize to a string of 193 characters:
Today I went to the market to pick up some fruit. <a href="http://www.externalsite.com/picture.jpg">
At the market there was this awesome fruit display!</a> Definitely want to go back
tomorrow!
The text the user will see on a page is only 138 characters:
Today I went to the market to pick up some fruit. At the market there was this awesome
fruit display! Definitely want to go back tomorrow!
The 193 character long text would be truncated by truncate, but if I had a work around the whole text would display, ending up appearing as just 138 characters with the link embedded.
For those interested, to get an accurate count without links, one can do:
(This is for a string that has html tags in it. If the string needs to be ‘textilized’ etc.. first, then the code is count = strip_tags(textilize(string)).count).
Rather than use truncate, I just limited the count to 140 characters of this true count ie switched this to a validation on the field.