Hi all,
I am trying to format a field so that it displays only a certain number of characters. so if the value in the field exceeds 20 than it will only display the first 20 characters. I checked the formatting feature in the bindings window and tried Trim but it has'nt shortened the value on the page I am displaying it on. I think i'm going about this the wrong way too because the trim, be it left or right, does'nt allow you to state how many characters you'd like to display so is there a way to display a certain number of characters of the value of a field ?

Thanks in advance,
Mitch.......

what language ?

I'm using VBScript.

use

str = left(str,20)

to truncate at 20 chars

or

two functions to truncate a string tidily

function GetSnippet(strIn,intMaxLen)
' extract a snippet of text from string
dim temp
dim EndPos
temp = left(strIn,intMaxLen)
EndPos = InStrRev(temp," ")
temp = left(temp, EndPos)
GetSnippet = temp
end function

function GetSnippetLength(strIn,Word,intRetLen)
' extract a fixed length snippet of text from string
dim lTemp
dim rTemp
dim WordPos
dim intStart
intStart = InStr(strIn,Word)
lTemp = mid(strIn,intStart- intRetLen, intRetLen)
rTemp = mid(strIn,intStart , intRetLen  + len(word) )
GetSnippetLength = "... " & lTemp & rTemp & " ..."
end function

the first will GetSnippet() will extract a fixed length string and will find the nearest space so it doesn't break words up.

the second GetSnippetLength() will extract a snippet from around a word. similar to Googles SERP snippets.