Using JavaScript to truncate text to a certain size (8 KB)

Question

I\'m using the Zemanta API, which accepts up to 8 KB of text per call. I\'m extracting the text to send to Zemanta from Web pages using JavaScript, so I\'m looking for a fun

Answer 1

As Dominic says, character encoding is the problem - however if you can either really ensure that you'll only deal with 8-bit chars (unlikely but possible) or assume 16-bit chars and limit yourself to half the available space, i.e. 4096 chars then you could attempt this.

It's a bad idea to rely on JS for this though because it can be trivially modified or ignored and you have complications of escape chars and encoding to deal with for example. Better to use JS as a first-chance filter and use whatever server-side language you have available (which will also open up compression).