It would be really nice if you would truncate at the end of words, not in the middle of them... :dunno
If I get a chance, I might try modifying yapleo's expandGalleryDescription to provide a little bit longer description than standard and truncate at a word boundary...
Okay, so I actually did implement this code a couple months ago. It has been working quite well on my site. Gallery descriptions are now truncated on word boundaries based on the number of characters I specify (150 in my example code) and then an ellipsis is added at the end.
This includes Payne Cheng's expandGalleryDescription modified to call my smartTruncate function.
// smartTruncate by Bill Gerrard, http://www.PrimaryColors.com
// Truncate to maximum of maxLen characters on nearest word boundary, append ellipsis
function smartTruncate(sText, maxLen) {
if (sText.length <= maxLen) {
return sText;
} else {
var words = sText.split(" ");
var tmpText = "";
var i = 0;
while(i < words.length-1) {
outText = tmpText;
tmpText += words[i] + " ";
if (tmpText.length > maxLen) {
break;
}
outText = tmpText;
i++;
}
return outText.substring(0,outText.length-1) + " ...";
}
}
//
// expandGalleryDescription - Payne Cheng
//
function expandGalleryDescription() {
re1 = /^([^:]*)\s*:\s*(.*)/;
re2 = /^(.*)\s*\.\.\.\s*(.*)/;
divTags = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
for (i=0; i<divTags.length; i++)
{
if (divTags[i].className == "miniBox")
{
dTags = divTags[i].getElementsByTagName("div");
pTags = divTags[i].getElementsByTagName("p");
aTags = dTags[0].getElementsByTagName("a");
iTags = aTags[0].getElementsByTagName("img");
if ( re1.exec(iTags[0].getAttribute("title")) )
{
$desc = RegExp.$2;
}
if ( re2.exec(pTags[1].innerHTML) )
{
pTags[1].innerHTML = smartTruncate($desc + RegExp.$2, 150);
}
}
}
}