aaaah. i see. is this another case of 'everything is an object'? i need to wrap my head around the all pervasiveness of what that means in the future. thanks all. "Florian Gro <florgro / gmail.com> wrote in message news:danghf$l0b$1 / sea.gmane.org... > luke wrote: > > > 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) . "..."; > > The most correct way of doing this IMHO is this: > > str += "..." if str.slice!(200 .. -1) > > which will cut away everything after the first 200 characters and append > a marker if the string was truncated. > > Your PHP solution would map to this: > > str = str[0, 200] + "..." > > >