How to get a substring of text?

Question

I have text with length ~700. How do I get only ~30 of its first characters?

Answer 1

Since you tagged it Rails, you can use truncate:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#method-i-truncate

Example:

 truncate(@text, :length => 17)

Excerpt is nice to know too, it lets you display an excerpt of a text Like so:

 excerpt('This is an example', 'an', :radius => 5)
 # => ...s is an exam...

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#method-i-excerpt