Auto cut-tagging achieved

[learnedax]

Well, that was easy. I've been fiddling a bit with making my friends view block quizlets, which involves a bunch of string parsing that the LJ style language does not already include, and laurion commented that it would be handy to chop entries over a certain length. I realized that I could do that by adding two lines to the basic layout, so now my friends page auto-cuts after 1000 characters. (That number is actually rather smaller than I want for regular use, but works well for demonstration purposes.)

Take that, overlong uncut entries.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Ha! See here. Way to get my back!

Now, can you explain it so the rest of us understand?

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Sure. The actual code modification was changing

$content = $e.text;

to

if ($e.text->length() > 1000) {
  $content = $e.text->substr(0, 1000) +
    "<p><strong>[POST HAS BEEN CUT FOR LENGTH. SEE FULL POST AT <a href=\""
    + $e.permalink_url + "\">THIS LINK</a>.]</strong>";
} else { $content = $e.text; }

inside the print_entry function.

$e is the Entry object, which contains all the metadata as well as the raw text. $content will later be passed to another function for pretty formatting, and normally would just be a straight dump of the user's input, $e.text, but I'm intercepting it. If the text is longer than my cutoff, I take just that much and append a link to the full entry; otherwise, it gets passed along normally.

Pretty basic change, and there's a lot I could do to make it cleaner (starting with abstracting out the magic number). But, hey, that stuff takes longer than 30 seconds.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Where does this code go? What style FAQ should I be reading?

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

The Advanced Customization page (http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/), which they have cleverly not linked to under any of the Edit My Style pages, even though I'm set to use S2. The docs are reasonably good.

In S2 you have the option to create a pile of different 'layers', but the basic one you want is a top-level layout layer. I copied and pasted the code of mine from the stock Tabular Indent layer, and then tweaked here and there, because I didn't have sweeping changes to enact. It is in this layer that I have added the new code.