This is a simple plugin to cut a string of plain text (not (X)HTML!) at a specified character limit (UTF-8 aware) and then add a trailing string (i.e. ellipsis).

You can use it to take an article title (or any other non-html escaped text) and trim it down to a specified character limit then add an ellipses. Possibly used for article navigation (prev/next) or an article list where you want to keep the titles short.

Example:

<txp:sab_substr limit="10" trail="..."><txp:title /></txp:sab_substr>

will output “long string…”, assuming the title is ‘long string title’.

Attributes:

• trail=“html text”
  The string you want appended to the result. It will NOT be appended UNLESS the content was trimmed. Defaults to ‘…’ (ellipsis).
• limit=“integer”
  The length of the string you want returned, not counting the length of the trailing text. Defaults to 10.

PS. This plugin was originally released by Steve from bluecamel.org, but when it was no longer available, I wrote it anew from scratch to be a drop-in replacement.