Why does leading article cut off after 5 words?

lunarview22

Hello,

I cannot work out what is controlling the cutting off of articles when displayed in Category Blog layout.

For example, if you go to this page:
https://www.lastek.com.au/metrology

You can see the top item, called metrology, cuts off the text after 4 words. The complete article reads "Advanced Instrumentation for precision metrology", but as displayed, it cuts off the last word.

I cannot find anywhere where this number of words displayed is controlled. Can someone please suggest where I might find it? This should be something pretty basic, but it does not seem to be in any of the relevant options pages or anywhere that i can find.

I have not included site access information because it is not needed to answer this question.

If you can answer the question for me, that would be much appreciated.

pavit

lunarview22

That's the article text, url in your example point to this article https://www.lastek.com.au/home/principals/metrology/3804-metrology change number of words in article and changes are reflected on the category-blog page too

lunarview22

Thanks for your reply.

No, it's not the article text. The full article text reads "Advanced instrumentation for precision metrology."

However it is displayed on the /metrology page as "Advanced instrumentation for precision...."

Click on any of the top menus items and the same thing happens. When the article is displayed as a leading article on a category blog layout page, it truncates the text. Indeed all articles displayed on these pages have the text truncated.

What I am looking for is the control on how much text is truncated. What is it that determines how much of the full article is displayed on the category blog page. In the example I've shown above, there arre 5 words in the article and only 4 displayed. The number of words seems to vary between articles, and I cannot work out what the algorithm is or where it is being controlled.

I would appreciate it if you can have another look and let me know your thoughts. If you need access to backend let me know, but I would not think you would need it. This should be something obvious really but I cant see it. Thanks.

saguaros

Hi lunarview22

On that category blog page, template will display introtext of article, I'm not sure if you have any customization on this as by default, the template truncates the introtext to show 200 characters.

If you want to show the introtext fully, you can go to file:

/templates/ja_magz_ii/html/com_content/category/blog_item.php

Then comment or remove these 2 lines of code:

$this->item->introtext = substr(strip_tags($this->item->introtext), 0, 200);
$this->item->introtext = substr($this->item->introtext, 0, strrpos($this->item->introtext, ' ')) . " ...";

lunarview22

thanks very much for reply.

I don't recall ever making any customisation for this.

How could I customise it to make it truncate to any particular number of characters?

And why would it currently be truncating to a different number of characters each time? It does not seem to be a consistent number of truncated characters?

Thanks.

saguaros

lunarview22 How could I customise it to make it truncate to any particular number of characters?

Kindly check this line:

$this->item->introtext = substr(strip_tags($this->item->introtext), 0, 200);

200 is the length of string (here is introtext), you can change to the number you wish and it should be consistent.

If it doesn't work, share me the admin + ftp account so I can check.

lunarview22

Thanks again for your replies. OK, by changing the value of 200 to another value, I was able to change the amount of truncated text on the intro articles, but it did not have any effect on the leading article.

The leading articles are being truncated to much less than 200 characters so I suppose this is being controlled from another line of code somewhere.

So I still want to be able to control how much text is being truncated in these leading articles.

I've included login administrator details which should enable you to log in to admin and see what is going on.

If you can solve this for me, I would be grateful. Much appreciated. Thanks.

lunarview22

OK, yes, this is still an issue. If I comment out those two lines, too many unintended consequences result, so I want to leave them there.

So now I am back to the problem of the "leading articles". These truncate to some other length, not the 200 characters in those two lines of code above.

I would like to control the number of characters being truncated in the leading article. Could someone please help me by showing me where this is being controlled? thank you.

lunarview22

Another comment. If I comment out those two lines, the articles as now displayed include all the links that are in the text. These links disappear when the lines are not commented. It would be really nice to have both features at the same time, that is to be able to truncate the text to 200 characters or whatever, and also to have the links showing up.

Is there any easy way to alter the code to make this happen? Any advice or comment would be appreciated. Thanks.

saguaros

lunarview22
Could you share the FTP account and send me the URL where article has link in introtext?

lunarview22

Thanks for your response.

I've added ftp details. Please let me know any problems but should be good.

Here is one such article including a link:
https://www.lastek.com.au/home/principals/detection/3738-ames-photonics-2

it appears on this page
https://www.lastek.com.au/detection

Much appreciated your efforts. Thank you again.

lunarview22

Also please don't forget the original issue of the truncated characters in the Leading Article.

It looks to me like its set to about 50 characters btw. thanks.

saguaros

lunarview22
Let me check and will get back to you.

lunarview22

Thanks. Some more information. It is only truncating to the very short length on certain pages leading off the top bar of the main menu, for example

https://www.lastek.com.au/lasers-sources
https://www.lastek.com.au/detection
https://www.lastek.com.au/motion
https://www.lastek.com.au/metrology

something seems to be overriding the 200 char limit, but I cannot find what it is.

it all seems to be behaving normally on other pages.

except I would very much like to be able to display links if that was possible.

I can just do a workaround for those pages as on this page
https://www.lastek.com.au/safety
by displaying category text rather than leading article...

but I'd rather understand and be able to control this parameter.

anyway any thoughts or suggestions or solutions you have would be welcome

thanks for your effort.

lunarview22

Hah! I see what is happening now. On all those examples truncating to much less than 200 characters, it's because there are much less than 200 characters on the page. I expected that if there were less characters than the limit number, in this case 200, it would default to displaying all of them.

But no, this is not what happens. The algorithm declares it must truncate at least one word. So if there are 6 words, it will display five of them, followed by the ellipsis i.e ... , even though there are much less than 200 characters.

Maybe my idea of what should be default is off, but it seems to me this what should happen. I want to be able to display short text in those top articles without it being cut off.

So, anyway, if it is possible to tweak this in the php code easily, that would be great, to set it to display all characters if there are less than the limit that has been set.

but if not, a workaround reaadily suggests itself. I just add a dummy word at the end of the article. It doesn't get displayed. No one clicks through on those anyway. Or maybe I just add more information after the read more. It does the same thing there by the way: if you insert a read more before the 200 characters, it still truncates one word prior to where it has been set. So it seems its not possible to sensibly set the end of an article to display in blog layout if it is less than the number of characters.

Any comments suggestions fixes welcome! Thanks.

saguaros

Hi lunarview22

If you want to count the words to show instead of characters, you can comment or remove above code:

$this->item->introtext = substr(strip_tags($this->item->introtext), 0, 50);
$this->item->introtext = substr($this->item->introtext, 0, strrpos($this->item->introtext, ' ')) . " ...";
echo $this->item->introtext;

and replace it with:

$rawText = strip_tags($this->item->introtext);
$frags = explode(' ', $rawText);
$max = 5;
$count = count($frags) > $max ? $max : count($frags);
$introtext = '';
for ($i=0; $i < $count; $i++) { 
    $introtext .= $frags[$i] . ' ';
}

echo $introtext . '...';

https://prnt.sc/pm4b0j

lunarview22

Thanks this is helpful.

But what I would really like, now that I understand what is happening, is for the introtext to publish in full if it is less than 200 characters. (or however many characters).

After all, surely this should be how it is set up for the default position. If there are less than 200 characters in an article, then why would you want to simply truncate the final word? That would mean that the visitor would have to click on the article, expecting to read more, but only to find one more word.

Surely, if the amount of text is less than 200 characters then you would want the full text to display as the introtext, so that the visitor does not need to click through just to read one more word.

So;...if this is an easy thing to code, i would be very grateful. Simply arrange it so that if the number of characters is less than 200, it displays all the characters.

Thanks.

saguaros

Hi lunarview22

I want to summarize a bit here.

On category blog page, it will show 'introtext' of each article.

Due to the design of this template, it will show some text then 3 dots '...' at the end of these text.

Now, there are some ways that you can choose:

1) If you don't want to truncate the intro text, simply remove the code as I suggested in the beginning of this topic
2) In case you want to truncate by words (not characters), use my suggestion above so you can decide how many words of introtext will show there.

I hope this makes senses.

lunarview22

Thanks for your summary. I understand what you are saying.

The design of this category blog layout however in my view is not very well thought out.

The way it handles articles less than the specified number of characters, or words, is not sensible.

If the article is only 7 words long, for example, this layout will truncate that to 6 words, so the visitor has to click through to read the full article just to read the 7th word. That is, well, not sensible.

It would be much better for it to have been designed so that if the length of intro text is less than the defined amount, then it goes ahead and displays the full introtext.

but anyway, ok, that's how it is. Like I say, I have a workaround now, which is to insert a dummy word so that the dummy word gets truncated. It's not perfect, but it's better than having that last word truncated.

Thanks for your attention to my query. i really appreciate it.