Cut a description to length
A listing card has room for a fixed number of characters, and a description cut mid-word looks broken.
- Text already within the limit is returned untouched.
- Otherwise take the first `limit` characters and append three dots.
- If that slice would land mid-word, fall back to the last space inside it — but a slice that already ends on a word boundary keeps its last word.
- With no space to fall back to, cut hard at the limit and still append the dots.
- A limit of zero or less gives an empty string.
truncateWords(text: string, limit: int) → string
Go needs a compiler and Drill does not host one yet, so this page is the reference rather than an exercise: the problem, worked examples, and the solution in full. To type it out, the same problem runs in Python.
Where you start
func truncateWords(text string, limit int) string {
}Worked examples
| Call | Result |
|---|---|
truncateWords("The quick brown fox", 10) | "The quick..." |
truncateWords("Supercalifragilistic", 5) | "Super..." |
truncateWords("Short", 10) | "Short" |
truncateWords("a b c d e f", 5) | "a b c..." |
Hint
Look at the character sitting at `limit`: if it is a space, the slice is already clean and needs no trimming back.
Reference solution in Go
func truncateWords(text string, limit int) string {
if limit <= 0 {
return ""
}
if len(text) <= limit {
return text
}
cut := text[:limit]
if text[limit] != ' ' {
if sp := strings.LastIndexByte(cut, ' '); sp > 0 {
cut = cut[:sp]
}
}
return strings.TrimRight(cut, " \t\n") + "..."
}