Peppercorn aims to be a simple and easy to use library for truncating HTML properly. It works using the fast Nokogiri ruby gem to parse a string of HTML into a document fragment. Then steppes through that document's children until it has counted the desired number of words.

The simple case is a simple string: "Hello World"

"Hello World".truncate_html(1)  # => "Hello…"

Of course if you don't like "…" on the end you could use something else:

"Hello World".truncate_html(1, :tail => " All")  # => "Hello All"

Now some simple HTML examples:

"<p>Hello World, I make HTML truncation easy.</p>".truncate_html(5) # => "<p>Hello World, I make HTML&#8230;</p>"
"<span>Hello World, I make HTML truncation easy.</span>".truncate_html(5) # => "<span>Hello World, I make HTML</span>&#8230;"

Notice the location of the tail in both examples. In the first example the tail is placed before the end of the paragraph. In the second, it is placed right after the span. Peppercorn will not append the tail to an inline level element. As a result you can use a link in the tail since 'a' is an inline element:

"<p><span>Hello World, I make HTML truncation easy.</span></p>".truncate_html(5, :tail => "...<a href\"read_more.html\">Read More</a>")

becomes: "<p><span>Hello World, I make HTML</span>...<a href\"read_more.html\">Read More</a></p>"

• 0.0.3 2011/11/04

  • Renamed String#truncate to String#peppercorn_truncate so peppercorn will work with rails

• 0.0.2 2011/10/28

  • Some refactoring and Added Nokogiri::XML::Node#appendable_node

• 0.0.1 2011/10/25

  • Initial Release

Copyright (c) 2011 Wade West

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