Question

We store our blog posts in a text column in our database. We need a “preview” of the blog post for our blog’s home page. That way, we can display the last couple days’ blog posts with links to read the whole thing.

Is there a way in rails to pull out a certain amount of a text column? Maybe the first x bytes? I understand this won’t be the same length for every blog post, but it should get it in the general area.

Or maybe do some html/css hack where we overflow a div and add an elipse to the div?

I could also see creating a separate “preview” column, but that feels very hacky.

Rails 3.2.1. Database is MySQL

Answer 1

If I undertood correctly, you want something that transforms a long text entry into a limited preview text, like This is a preview text, and it says that....

To do that, you can simple do something like:

text = post.text[0..100] + "..."

It basically gets the first 100 characters from the text.
If you want something more complex, that takes words in account (so you don’t end up with things like This is a previ..., you can have a function that separates the text into words and add them to the final text until they reach the required length, like:

text = post.text
words = text.split(" ")
final_text = ""
words.each do |word|
    final_text += word if final_text.size + word.size < DESIRED_LENGTH
end
final_text += "..."