hi, i've been searching high and low for a method that will help me do this for a couple of days, but decided eventually just to post here in the hope someone can point out the probably blatantly obvious for me :) i'm looking for something that can take a string and truncate it to a certain amount of characters. then i can add '...' at the end. i used to use substr() when working with php $str = substr( $str, 0, 200) . "..."; many thanks luke