Truncate Text (Character Limit Cutter)

Truncating text is everyday work: a meta description, a product title for a marketplace, a preview line in an app, a database column with a byte limit, or a post that must fit a platform. This tool cuts text to a number of characters, words, UTF-8 bytes or lines, backs up to the last whole word if you want, and adds an ellipsis or your own ending that can count toward the limit. It can shorten every line of a list separately, or extract a slice from one position to another.

How to use this tool

1. Paste the text.
2. Choose to cut to a limit or extract a slice, and whether to count characters, words, bytes or lines.
3. Set the limit, the ending (…, ... or your own) and whether it counts toward the limit.
4. Copy the result; the note shows how much was kept.

Formula

Kept text = the longest prefix whose size ≤ limit − size(ending), shortened to the last space if cutting inside a word

Characters are counted as user-perceived characters (graphemes), so emoji, flags and accented letters are never split. Bytes are counted in UTF-8, where English letters take 1 byte, most accented letters 2, Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters 3 and emoji 4, and a multi-byte character is never cut in half. Words are runs of non-space characters. Trailing spaces are removed before the ending is added. Slice positions start at 1 and include both ends.

Example

The default 133-character sentence cut to 60 characters with “…” counted in the limit keeps at most 59 characters; cutting at a word boundary backs up to “Our new guide explains how to plan a week of meals in 20” and adds the ellipsis, giving 57 characters in total.