Hi,

I have a string value, that is sometimes too long to display.

After about 80(ish) characters, I want to stop displaying it, but I don't want to stop splitting a word in the middle. It needs to look back to the first space to prevent that.

A space will define the end of a word.

Note: If a word is more than 80 characters, than the word should be split.

Any help will be much appreciated!

An example input is the following:
The sky is blue. The rose is red. The carpet is orangepurple.

The expected output is the following (if # of chars to split is 10):
The sky is
 blue. The
 rose is
red. The
carpet is
orangepurp
le.


I like my input parameters to be a string and the # of chars to split. Basically, 2 input parameters.

XSLT 1.0 or 2.0? As always, it's going to be easier with 2.0, but a 1.0 solution isn't impossible.

Also you haven't said what the output is. Let's suppose you want to output a <br/> at the end of a line (putting a <p>...</p> around each line is probably a little bit harder, though when you've done one you should be able to do the other.

In principle you can do it like this:

* Call normalize-space() on the input so there are no multiple internal spaces.

* define a function or template "wordwrap" that takes three arguments: the text: the desired line-length, and the number of characters output on the current line so far.

* in this function, find the first space in the text (using string-length(substring-before())). If this plus the length-output-so-far exceeds the desired line length, output a <br/>, and call yourself recursively with length-output-so-far reset to zero. But if the first space position is greater than the desired line length and the length-so-far is zero, force a break after the desired-line-length number of characters. In all other cases, output the characters up to the first space and call yourself recursively, with substring($in, first-space-position + 1) as the text to be processed, and $length-so-far + first-space-position + 1 as the length-so-far.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

XSLT 1.0

The expected output should be the following:
The sky is<br/>
 blue. The<br/>
 rose is <br/>
red. The <br/>
carpet is <br/>
orangepurp<br/>
le.<br/>

I think the purpose of Michael's post was that he gave you the methodology behind the code, and you should try it yourself and if you have further problems come back to us - we are not a free code writing service you know.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/