Question

Let’s say you have a string with embedded links and tags like so:

 This string has <a href="http://www.google.com">some links</a> inside it.

Then the visible string to a user is:

 This string has some links inside it.

The full string has 73 characters and the visible just 37 characters. What I would like is to be able to both in jQuery and in Rails get character counts for strings counting just visible characters. (jQuery such that I could give a live character count in an input field, and Rails for validations and truncation purposes).

Anyone know anything that could help? Surely there is some way of doing this..

Answer 1

This only answers the JavaScript half of your question.

In jQuery, if you have a string like this –

var text = 'This string has <a href="http://www.google.com">some links</a> inside it.'

Then you could do something like –

$('<div></div>').append(text).text()

which would give you –

This string has some links inside it.

So $('<div></div>').append(text).text().length would get you the length of the string without the html mark-up.