Thread

How can I avoid this? (link titled ‘business link’)

weblog looks like this:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="links" orderby="date" limit="50"}
<h2 class="low">{title} </h2
{link_address}
{link_summary}
{link_image}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Is there a character limit property or some such device for reigning longer than usual words like links for example.

Cheers, Liam

You can use CSS to keep it from spilling out of its content area with overflow: hidden; / overflow: auto;.  To physically limit the characters will depend largely on how you are entering the links in your weblog.  Are you entering a fully marked up link, or just the address, and letting the addresses be auto-converted to links?

Thanks Derek

Don’t really want to use CSS… Users will enter an address - link is auto converted

I found this plug-in: http://expressionengine.com/downloads/details/character_limiter/
But can’t get it working…

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="links" orderby="date" limit="50"}
<h2 class="low">{title} </h2
{exp:char_limit total="35"}{link_address}{/exp:char_limit}
{link_summary}
{link_image}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Am I missing something easy?

The character limiter plugin, which comes with EE by default, is also “word smart”, meaning that it does not limit a string to an exact length, but will add one word at a time until the limit is exceeded.  Since a URL has no spaces, it is all one “word”.  Also, if your link is auto-converted, then you’re passing a fully marked up link to the plugin, not just the address, so a simple “true” character limiter will not work either.

<a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>

Forcing this to 35 characters would yield a broken link:

<a href="http://example.com/">http://

<a href="{link_address}"><?php if (strlen('{link_address}') > 35): echo substr('{link_address}', 0, 35).'…'; else echo '{link_address}'; ?></a>

The second option would be to create an extension that would automatically rewrite auto-created links in a truncated fashion as necessary.

Thanks derek

I’ll take a look at your suggestions.

Cheers, Liam

TruncHTML with exact=“yes” would result in what you excpected character limiter to do.

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="links" orderby="date" limit="50"}
<h2 class="low">{title} </h2
{exp:trunchtml chars="35" ending="…" exact="yes"}{link_address}{/exp:trunchtml}
{link_summary}
{link_image}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Nifty, silenz.  Have you considered submitting it to the Add-On library?

Thanks Silenz - looks good that.