asked on

Displaying First N characters on Output

I have a table where i want to cfoutput query a number of fields from a database

I have a one field that can have quite a long description and would just like to display the first 100 characters and then cut it off with a couple of ..

Example
FieldID Description Field3
1 a long description lots of text... etc..

How would i go about accomplishing this ?!

Cheers

JT

SOLUTION

cyberdevil67

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

James Rodgers

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

James Rodgers

or if you are outputting the text into a fixed sized object, div, td etc., you can use teh text over-flow css attribute, but it is IE(6) only

see here
http://www.blakems.com/archives/000077.html
this is a great site
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/properties/position/textoverflow.htm

SOLUTION

Dain_Anderson

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

James Rodgers

>>All of these answers are correct, but consider this that simply using Left() will "chop" your words off in the middle of the word. I would recommend using a UDF:

the way we do it for our 'news' headlines is up to the first .

left(string,find(". ",string)) <<-- notice the space after the . , prevents cut off of $10.36, looks for the first full stop.

no problems as of yet

Dain_Anderson

Yeah, that works if you need to stop at a full sentence or need to avoid chopping dollar values -- definitely a plus in many situations. We use the FullLeft() in areas where we need a "blurb" that could potentially lead to a very long page. The common denominator is that either method prevents "chopping," which I personally can't stand! :-)

mrichmon

Also another thing to consider is that if your string is LESS than 100 you could get an error so be careful that whichever method you use accounts for the actual length of the string for shorter strings.

jturkington

ASKER

How would you validate this with

<cfoutput>
#left(field,100)#<cfif len(field) GT 100> ...</cfif>
</cfoutput>

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

mrichmon

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

James Rodgers

glad i could help

thanks for the points