guitsaru

I’m working on a site that has a fixed page height and should not scroll. Because of this, the amount of text displayed on a page needs to not exceed a maximum value. I wrote the following function to break a string into lines based on either line breaks, or the amount of characters that can fit across the div.

Ruby 1.9 already has a function to break a string into lines; however, this does not include the option to break up a line based on characters and I am still on Ruby 1.8.6.

def lines s, chars=0
  string = s
  line_array = Array.new
  while(string.size > 0)
    i = string.index("\n")

    # Takes the string up to either the first line break
    line = string.slice!(0..(i || string.size - 1)).chomp

    # Breaks the line up into separate lines based on the number of characters
    if line.size > chars && chars > 0
      while(line.size > chars)
        ending = chars - 1
        unless line[ending + 1, 1] == " "
          ending = line.size - 1 - line.reverse.index(" ", -ending)
        end
        line_array << line.slice!(0..ending).strip
      end
    end

    line_array << line.strip
  end
  return line_array
end