Here’s a TruncateAtWhitespace function that takes an incoming parameter value and an incoming max length, and returns a substring broken at a whitespace position. This way if you have “Lance has a blog” and you need to truncate it to 8 characters or less, you get “Lance…” instead of “Lance ha”.
PowerShell
/// <summary>
/// Truncate at the end of a word
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value">The original string</param>
/// <param name="maxlength">The maximum length of string to return</param>
/// <returns>A substring of the original, broken at the end of a word</returns>
public static string TruncateAtWhitespace(string value, int maxlength)
{
maxlength = maxlength - 3; //allow for ending "..."
if (value.Length <= maxlength) return value + "...";
int closestwhitespaceindex = value.Substring(0, maxlength).LastIndexOf(" ");
if (closestwhitespaceindex > 0)
{
value = value.Substring(0, closestwhitespaceindex) + "...";
}
else
{
value = value.Substring(0, maxlength);
}
return value;
}