How to limit the characters of a string using AngularJS

Question

I want to limit the number of characters that are displayed when "ng-repeat" displays JSON data. This app is using AngularJS inside the RoR framework. Currently I have the following code which displays each "item.description" but does not limit the number of characters in the string to a length of 25.

HTML:

<div ng-controller="MyController">
  <ul>
    <li ng-repeat="item in artists">
     {{item.description | limitTo:25}}
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

Controller:

var myApp = angular.module('myApp', []);

myApp.controller("MyController", function MyController($scope, $http){
$http.get("/assets/data.json").success(function(data){
    $scope.artists = data;
  });

I also tried putting the "limitTo:" option inside "ng-repeat" but that limited the amount of "item.description(s)" being displayed, and did not limit the string/content. I followed these instructions for this problem: https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/filter/limitTo

Answer 1

There is a better way to do this

add a property to string's prototype object, to truncate a string

/**
 * extends string prototype object to get a string with a number of characters from a string.
 *
 * @type {Function|*}
 */
String.prototype.trunc = String.prototype.trunc ||
function(n){

    // this will return a substring and 
    // if its larger than 'n' then truncate and append '...' to the string and return it.
    // if its less than 'n' then return the 'string'
    return this.length>n ? this.substr(0,n-1)+'...' : this.toString();
};

and this is how we use it in HTML

.....
<li ng-repeat="item in artists">
     // call the trunc property with 25 as param 
     {{ item.description.trunc(25) }}
</li>
.....

here is a DEMO