Hi X-perts,
What is the simplest way to truncate a string to a certain length but keep the words intact?
If we use a direct string cut as
If (Len(fName) > 24) Then trName = Left(fName, 24) & "..."
it may cut words in the middle. I need to make the length max 24 characters, but, if it cuts a word, it should also remove this half-word completely.
Please, advise.
Thanks
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Also, you need to take into account the other characters which might constitute an end of word like ".", "!", "?" and end of line markers like carriage return and linefeed. If these characters could be part of your string you might consider replacing them with a space prior to processing (after the first truncation) so your loop only has to look for a space.
andy7789 That sounds quite reasonable. First replace any potential end of word character with space, then use split to create the array, then loop deleting the last word until the string is less than or equal to the desired length. Some prior knowledge about the average length of the original string compared to the desired length might lead you do some initial truncate if the average original size is much larger than the desired length.
I see one other gotcha. When you are replacing possible end of word characters with a space you might replace a period when it is actually part of the word as in Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc. Again, knowing what your input data will look like and what is acceptable output will determine just how complicated you need to make your algorithm.
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by: jeflabaPosted on 2009-09-21 at 17:21:24ID: 25388851
I would create a function to return a truncated string from a passed string. The first step is to truncate the passed string to the desired size + 1. Then loop deleting the last character until the last character is a space then delete the space and return the truncated string. The reason you need to add 1 to the desired length is to handle one character words like "I" and "a."