Truncate text to an exact character, word, or sentence limit with a live preview — choose an ellipsis, a custom 'Read more' label, or your own suffix, and optionally preserve whole words so a cut never lands mid-word.
There's no single 'correct' way to shorten text — the right approach depends entirely on what the shortened text is for. Character-based truncation is the right tool when a strict length constraint exists (a database column, an SMS limit, a fixed-width UI badge); word-based truncation is the right tool for readable previews and excerpts where you want a natural-feeling snippet rather than an arbitrary character cutoff; sentence-based truncation is the right tool when you want the shortened version to remain fully grammatically coherent, ideal for article summaries and meta descriptions.
A character limit that ignores word boundaries can produce genuinely confusing or embarrassing results — imagine a product description truncated mid-word into something that reads as a completely different (and potentially inappropriate) word. Preserving whole words trades a small amount of precision (the result may land a few characters short of the exact limit) for guaranteed readability, which is the right trade-off in almost every real-world display context; only disable it when an exact character count genuinely matters more than readability, such as satisfying a hard technical constraint.
An ellipsis (…) is the universal, minimal signal that content continues beyond what's shown — appropriate almost anywhere space is tight. A 'Read more' label does the same job while also functioning as an implicit call to action, appropriate for blog previews and article cards where you want to nudge a click-through. A custom suffix gives full control for anything else — a specific phrase, a translated label for a non-English audience, or simply nothing when the interface already makes clear elsewhere that content was shortened.
This tool identifies sentence boundaries by looking for a period, question mark, or exclamation point immediately followed by whitespace or the end of the text — a fast, dependency-free heuristic that correctly handles the vast majority of ordinary prose. It intentionally favors simplicity and speed over the much heavier machinery a full natural-language sentence tokenizer would require (which would need to understand abbreviations, quotations, and countless edge cases) — a trade-off that keeps this tool instant and works correctly for the overwhelming majority of real-world text.
Rather than requiring a separate 'truncate' button and a wait, every adjustment — mode, limit, suffix, word preservation — recalculates the result instantly, so you can dial in exactly the right length and style by watching the live preview rather than guessing and re-checking. This matters especially for character-based truncation with word preservation on, where the actual resulting length can shift by a few characters as you adjust the limit slider, and seeing that shift immediately is far faster than trial and error.
Text Truncator pairs naturally with these text tools for previewing and formatting excerpted content.