Question

Is there a shorter way to cut this Chinese text so that it fits in a $print_length width print column?

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use 5.10.1;
use utf8;
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';
use Unicode::GCString;

my $print_length = 15;

my $string1 = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
say substr( $string1, 0, $print_length );

my $string2 = '大佛頂如來密因修證了義諸菩薩萬行首楞嚴經'; # don't know what that means
say fit_for_column( $string2 );

sub fit_for_column {
    my ( $string ) = @_;

    my $gcs = Unicode::GCString->new( $string ); 
    my $pcw = $gcs->columns();

    while ( $pcw > $print_length ) {
        $string =~ s/\X\z//;
        $gcs = Unicode::GCString->new( $string );
        $pcw = $gcs->columns();
    }
    return $string;
}

Answer 1

For small texts like this I don’t think you can do much else. But for longer texts you might want to look into East Asian Width, and use that (maybe compressed into blocks of codepoints instead of one by one) as a reference for the width of the characters in your text. You could have a function that takes a string and returns its width (assuming standard = 1, W =2, H = 0.5 etc). Or that returns text within a set length.