Shorten title to a certain length

Question

Given a title and a max_length, what would be the best way to shorten the title? The following is what I had in mind:

def shorten_title(title, max_length):
    if len(title) > max_length:
        split_title = title.split()
        length = len(title)
        n = 1
        while length > max_length:
            shortened_title = split_title[:length(split_title)-n]
            n+=1
        return shortened_title
    else:
        return title

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

>>> shorten_title = lambda x, y: x[:x.rindex(' ', 0, y)]
>>> shorten_title('Shorten title to a certain length', 20)
'Shorten title to a'

That should be enough if breaking on a space is all you need. Otherwise, there are several other posts on more complex methods, like: Truncate a string without ending in the middle of a word .

Update to address comment from okm:

To handle edge cases, like finding no spaces before max_length, address them explicitly:

def shorten_title2(x, y):
    if len(x) <= y:
        return x
    elif ' ' not in x[:y]:                                          
        return x[:y]
    else:
        return x[:x.rindex(' ', 0, y + 1)]

This code has some problems: 1. it fails string not having space 2. need tweak on edge condition, for example `shorten_title('Shorten title to a certain length', 26)` does not give `'Shorten title to a certain'` which is exactly 26 chars long. — okm, Apr 25 '12 at 12:12

jgritty · Answer 2 · 2012-04-24T23:34:47.190

def shorten_title(title, max_length):
    return title[:max_length + 1]

How about that?

OK, without splitting up words, you want this:

import string

def shorten_title(title, max_length):
    if len(title) > max_length:
        split_title = title.split()
        length = len(title)
        n = 1
        while length > max_length:
            shortened_title = split_title[:-n]
            n = n + 1
            length = len(string.join(shortened_title))
        if shortened_title == []:
            return title[:max_length + 1]
        return string.join(shortened_title)
    else:
        return title

Here are the results I see:

print shorten_title("really long long title", 12)
print shorten_title("short", 12)
print shorten_title("reallylonglongtitlenobreaks", 12)

really long
short
reallylonglon

I tried to keep the code and logic similar to the original poster, but there are certainly more pythonic ways of doing this.

Correct, break on full words only (assume the max_length is > any given word) — David542, Apr 24 '12 at 23:49

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 24 '12 at 23:39

def shorten_title(title, max_length):
    title_split = split(title)
    out = ""
    if len(title_split[0]) <= max_length:
        out += title_split[0]
    for word in title_split[1:]:
        if len(word)+len(out)+1 <= max_length:
            out += ' '+word
        else:
            break
    return out[1:]

Try that :)

Shorten title to a certain length

3 Answers3