How to hide/show more text within a certain length (like youtube)

Question

I want to have a text to only be a certain amount of characters/length and after that length, I want to put a link to reveal the full length of the text.

The link w

Answer 1

I know this question is a little old (and has had it's answer selected already) but for those wanting another option that're coming across this question through Google (like I did), I found this dynamic text shortener:

Dynamically shortened Text with “Show More” link using jQuery

I found it was better because you could set the character limit, rather than extra spans in the code, or setting a specific height to a container.
Hope it helps someone else out!