jQuery HTML truncator

jQuery (JavaScript) plugin to truncate HTML text with "more"/"less" links.

For example, you might see

Lorem ipsum do (…more)

Clicking "…more" shows

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. (less)

Clicking "less" goes back to the truncated text.

There is also a live example (or try the provided example.html locally).

Graceful HTML handling

While there are many JavaScript truncators, this one is unique in handling HTML gracefully. That means you can truncate an element containing paragraphs, links, other markup and HTML entities without strange results.

<b>a &amp; b</b> is considered to be 5 (not 16) characters long during truncation, and truncation will never cause start tags to be missing their end tags, entities or tags to be broken apart, and so on.

Usage

As shown in the provided example.html, just do e.g.

$(function() {
  $('.example').truncate({max_length: 24});
});

The selector and options can, of course, be changed.

The available options are:

• more

  The text shown inside parentheses after the truncated text.

  Defaults to …more.

• less

  The text shown inside parentheses after the full text.

  Defaults to less.

• max_length

  Defaults to 100.

  Note that the  (…more) bit counts towards the max length – so a max length of 10 would truncate 1234567890 to 12 (…more).

Credits and license

By Henrik Nyh under the MIT license:

Copyright (c) 2008 Henrik Nyh

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.