Truncate Text

Common length targets

Characters or words?

Characters mode applies a hard budget: it keeps exactly the first N characters, even if the cut lands mid-word (“The quick brown fo”). Words mode keeps the first N whitespace-separated words, so the cut is always readable, but the character length of the result varies. Use characters for strict technical limits and words for human-readable teasers.

Two details of words mode: words are whatever is separated by spaces, tabs or line breaks, and when a cut happens the kept words are joined back together with single spaces, so line breaks inside the kept part become plain spaces.

The suffix is added on top of the limit

The limit counts what is kept from the original text; the suffix is appended after the cut. With a limit of 155 and the suffix “…”, the output can reach 158 characters. For a hard budget, subtract the suffix length yourself: 152 kept characters plus “…” lands exactly on 155. The one-character ellipsis (U+2026) saves two characters compared with “…”. When nothing was cut, no suffix is added.

Tricky characters

• Accents, Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK: counting uses Unicode-aware functions, so a character is never split into broken bytes, whatever the language.
• Emoji: characters mode counts Unicode code points. Complex emoji (families, flags, skin tones) consist of several code points, so a cut landing inside one can break it visually. Check the output when truncating emoji-heavy text.
• Unspaced scripts: Chinese, Japanese or Thai text without spaces counts as a single “word”, so words mode leaves it unchanged. Use characters mode for those scripts.
• HTML and Markdown: markup is plain text to this tool. <b>hello</b> counts as 12 characters, not 5, and a cut can land inside a tag. Truncate before adding markup.

Not the same as summarization

Truncation keeps the beginning and discards the rest. A summarizer rewrites, pulling key points from anywhere in the text. For meta descriptions truncation usually works, because the opening sentence carries the claim. To condense long content, use a text summarizer instead.