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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T22:28:43+00:00

This is a language-agnostic question – unless you count English as a language. I’ve

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This is a language-agnostic question – unless you count English as a language.

I’ve got this list of items which can have very long names.

For aesthetic purposes, these names must be made shorter in some cases, adding dots (…) to indicate that the name is longer. So for example, if article.name returns this:

lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

I’d like to get this other output.

lorem ipsum dolor ...

I can program this quite easily. My question is: how should I call that shortening operation? I mean the name, not the implementation. Is there a standard English name for it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Truncation, or soft truncation (because of the ellipsis)

    I would call the function truncate, and that seems to be the consensus.

    CPAN: http://metacpan.org/pod/String::Truncate
    MooTools: https://mootools.lighthouseapp.com/projects/2706/tickets/670-new-addition-stringtruncate-method
    Prototype: http://www.prototypejs.org/api/string/truncate
    Smarty: http://www.smarty.net/manual/en/language.modifier.truncate.php
    Jinja: http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/templates/#truncate

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