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Dynamic Length Truncate Tag

By Paul Kenjora | April 2, 2008

Almost a year ago I wrote about Simple Character Truncate Filter And Dot Dot Dot Variant which was a basic string truncate written as a Django filter. It worked great until I needed to dynamically specify the length. Turns out filters are not good at resolving context variables (at least I dont know of a simple way). So to follow up the success of the original filter I’ve created a dynamic version implemented as a tag. Now you can specify any string and length (as a variable) and it will be truncated to that length in place.

Code

The implementation for the new tag only handles context variables, if you are hard coding the length just use a slice filter or the Simple Character Truncate Filter And Dot Dot Dot Variant instead.

dynamic_truncate_tag.py

sample.html

Final Thoughts

If anyone knows of a tag or another mechanism in Django that does this already definitely leave a comment. I’ve found this tag very useful for various widgets I’ve written, the tag was created specifically to add user control to the Arkayne Widget.

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Topics: Filter, Template Tags | Comments