My script is writing to various files. Part of that is a text entry denoted say $input{'content'}

I can grab that fine and write the whole lot as needed.

But how do I just grab, say, the first 20 words of it and disregard the rest?

I've spent about 3 days searching around and not found anything that even remotely approaches the concept (plenty of stuff about extracting lines and records, but not a predefined number of words).

Hope you can help,
thanks - Ted

I this the sort of thing?

Code:

dolphin:~ graham$ cat plop $text = "The course was good and the tutor was better"; @words = split(/\s+/,$text); $starter = join(" ",@words[0..6]); print "$starter ... \n"; dolphin:~ graham$ perl plop The course was good and the tutor ... dolphin:~ graham$

Thanks Graham.

I had been looking at a split, but was way off base.

The join - I didn't even know there was such a thing.

I see how it works and that $starter now contains the extracted words from the new array @words. From there I can use $starter and refine my results, like HTML tag exclusions (the input is from a WYSIWYG editor) etc.

many thanks - Ted

Been there before, Ted, on the "removing tags" thing.

If you add in:
Code:

$text =~ s/<.*?>/ /gs;

then you'll remove all the tags and replace each of them with a space.   Do that before the split, by the way, which compresses any multiple resulting white spaces into single spaces.

If you need to go a bit more detailed / sophisticates, but may also want to get involved with deciding which tags result in a word break (things like <br>) and which can occur in the middle of a work (things like <u>); in that latter case, you would actually want to replace them with nothing rather than a space.   You might also want to get involved with replacing sequences like < with < characters ....


I had done some but they were after the split. I noticed inconsistancy happening. So gave the one (shorter than mine   ) you suggested a go.

The input is from a WYSIWYG editor and has different responses depending on which browser is used. The one thing that IE does is put in the
Code:

 

for spaces sometimes. I managed to clear those. It can insert entities on occassion.

There are probably others I will need to attend to as I continue the development.

The extraction is for an RSS feed, and XML does not like entities at all from what I see.

So far I've been testing it and my feed is getting written with new entries and updated, if I edit it - a feature for those of us who type too fast and put in "teh" instead of the, then discover it in our feed later on.



Well, I haven't broken it yet.  

Thanks for your input Graham.

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