Getting 1st N words of a variable

nipper

I have a variable with a long description, I want to take the 1st 25 words as a teaser and make a link to the page.

I can grab the 1st word with :

$desc =~ m|[\b([^\b]+?)\b]|;
my $shortdesc=$1;

Obviously I can brute force it 25 times, but I was trying to {25} it to see if I can get the correct data. Something like:

m|^([\b.*?\b]{25})|;


which is not working.

How far off am I ?

Andy

Adam Stoller

I have a variable with a long description, I want to take the 1st 25 words as a teaser and make a link to the page. I can grab the 1st word with : $desc =~ m|[\b([^\b]+?)\b]|; my $shortdesc=$1; Obviously I can brute force it 25 times, but I was trying to {25} it to see if I can get the correct data. Something like: m|^([\b.*?\b]{25})|; which is not working. How far off am I ? Andy

Not sure if this is what you were looking for - but:

my $MAXWORDS = 10;
my $desc = qq(This is a, rather, long piece of text with dubious value that could be treated as something of a test case);

my @sample = split(/\s/, $desc, $MAXWORDS + 1);
pop(@sample);
print join(" ", @sample) . "...\n"