Text Truncator
Trim text to a set number of characters or words with an ellipsis.
Limit by
Characters: 0Words: 0
Truncating text cleanly
Truncation shortens text to a maximum length — for meta descriptions, card excerpts, tweets, or table cells. This tool cuts by character or word count, trims any trailing space at the cut point so you never get a dangling fragment, and can append an ellipsis to signal there's more. Enable per-line mode to clip a whole list at once. It counts by Unicode code points and runs entirely in your browser.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Trimming a description to fit a meta tag or a card limit.
- Producing an excerpt of a fixed length for a listing.
- Cutting a title to fit a field with a hard cap.
- Checking where a limit falls in real copy.
- Producing consistent previews across a set of items.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Where should text be cut?
- At a word boundary, not mid-word — truncating "management" to "manage" changes the meaning rather than shortening it. Cut at the last space before the limit, then append the ellipsis.
- Should I use three dots or the ellipsis character?
- The single character … (U+2026) is typographically correct and counts as ONE character against a limit, where three periods count as three. Screen readers also handle it better than a run of periods.
- Does the ellipsis count toward the limit?
- It must, or the output exceeds the limit you set. Truncating to 100 characters and then appending … gives 101 — a real bug when the limit is a database column or an API constraint.
- How does this break with emoji?
- Cutting by code unit splits a surrogate pair and produces an invalid character, and it can detach a skin-tone modifier or split a ZWJ sequence. Truncation must operate on grapheme clusters to be safe.
- Should I truncate in CSS instead?
- For display, yes — text-overflow: ellipsis keeps the full text in the DOM, so it stays searchable and copyable, and it adapts to the container width. Truncate the data only when the storage or protocol demands it.
- Does truncating change the meaning?
- It can, and that is the risk a character limit hides. Cutting mid-clause can leave a sentence that reads as complete and says something else — a negation lost at the boundary is the worst case.
- Should truncation be by characters, words or bytes?
- Bytes only when a storage or protocol limit is genuinely in bytes, and then never mid-character. Words read better than characters; characters are more predictable for layout. Choose from what the limit is actually protecting.
Common errors and gotchas
- Truncating mid-word, which reads as an error rather than an excerpt.
- Cutting by code unit, which can split an emoji or a combining sequence into broken output.
- Forgetting the ellipsis counts toward the limit.
- Truncating a value used as a key, which silently creates collisions.
- Cutting HTML rather than text, which leaves unclosed tags behind.
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