How to truncate text until "more" link is clicked?

Question

I have a long series of paragraphs and I'd like to trim each down to 2 lines (50 characters) and when you click a link "more" it will show the full paragraph.

I am using the prototype library and rails.

I'd ideally like to do this with out breaking the paragraph into 2 divs and showing the other when you click on more. Or is that the only way?

Answer 1

Because I'm a jQuery guy, here is some psuedo code

• Select element which contains p
• Select after first 50 chars and wrap a div around with a class 'more-text'
• Insert with Js after a <button>more</button>
• Add a click event button that sets display: block or something more fancy on the more-text
• Remove button or change it's text to 'less' and change necessary code

Answer 2

Put your text in a div and set the height to your desired height (with overflow: hidden). When the more link is clicked set the div height to div.scrollHeight . If you're using jquery or mootools you can throw in a neat transition.

<div id="myText" style="overflow:hidden; height:50px;">Text here...</div>
<a href="javascript:;" onclick="showMore()">more</a>

<script type="text/javascript">
function showMore() {
    var mydiv = document.getElementById('myText');
    mydiv.style.height = mydiv.scrollHeight; 
}

// or with a transition (mootools)
function showMoreTransition() {
    new Fx.Tween($('myText'), {
     duration: 1000
    }).start('height', $('myText').getScrollHeight());
}
</script>

Answer 3

Do you have a problem with spans? It seems the most effective way set this up is to wrap the excess in a hidden span tag. You can even wrap the whole operationin a nice helper method to make it reusable.

Assuming prototype:

def sample_with_more(body, html_options = {})
  more_link = link_to_function(" More...", "$('more').hide(); $('hidden').show();', :id => 'more')


  content_tag(:div, html_options) do 
    body[0..49] + more_link + 
      content_tag(:span, body[50..-1], :style => "display:none", :id => "hidden")
  end
end

Answer 4

The above answers assume that you send the full text to the browser, then let it only display a certain amount of it by clipping it vertically. This is actually a good idea, as truncating a text afer a certain amount of characters is actually not as straight-forward as it seems.

In an early project, I had a long list of truncated texts and didn't want to send them all to the browser in full length. The important thing to keep in mind here is if your text may contain control or escape characters (e.g. HTML, BBCode, HTML-Entities, etc) you need to take special care about them.

I ended up writing a small HTML-tag parser to not deliver HTML tags which were cut in half, and to add end-tags to e.g. bold, italic, etc, to not screw up the rest of the screen layout.

Additionally, it's usually not what you want - i.e. you won't get two lines worth of text for different screen widths or when having line break characters in your text.