Ideal method to truncate a string with ellipsis

user_224004 0
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I'm sure all of us have seen ellipsis' on Facebook statuses (or elsewhere), and clicked "Show more" and there are only another 2 characters or so. I'd guess this is because of lazy programming, because surely there is an ideal method.

Mine counts slim characters [iIl1] as "half characters", but this doesn't get around ellipsis' looking silly when they hide barely any characters.

Is there an ideal method? Here is mine:

/**
 * Return a string with a maximum length of <code>length</code> characters.
 * If there are more than <code>length</code> characters, then string ends with an ellipsis ("...").
 *
 * @param text
 * @param length
 * @return
 */
public static String ellipsis(final String text, int length)
{
    // The letters [iIl1] are slim enough to only count as half a character.
    length += Math.ceil(text.replaceAll("[^iIl]", "").length() / 2.0d);

    if (text.length() > length)
    {
        return text.substring(0, length - 3) + "...";
    }

    return text;
}

Language doesn't really matter, but tagged as Java because that's what I'm mostly interested in seeing.

ellipsis java
13 Answers

Most of this solutions don't take font metrics into account, here is a very simple but working solution for java swing that i have used for years now.

private String ellipsisText(String text, FontMetrics metrics, Graphics2D g2, int targetWidth) {
   String shortText = text;
   int activeIndex = text.length() - 1;

   Rectangle2D textBounds = metrics.getStringBounds(shortText, g2);
   while (textBounds.getWidth() > targetWidth) {
      shortText = text.substring(0, activeIndex--);
      textBounds = metrics.getStringBounds(shortText + "...", g2);
   }
   return activeIndex != text.length() - 1 ? shortText + "..." : text;
}
user_25437990

You can also simply implement like this:

mb_strimwidth($string, 0, 120, '...')

Thanks.

user_5894870
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