Ready to truncate
Paste text, set your limit, and click Truncate// trim any text to exact length in one click
Truncate text by character, word, or sentence limit with custom suffix. Browser-based, free, no sign-up required.
Ready to truncate
Paste text, set your limit, and click TruncateEnter or paste any text into the input field on the left.
Choose mode (chars / words / sentences), set a limit, and customize the suffix.
Get the trimmed result instantly with stats showing how much was reduced.
The Text Truncator trims any text to a precise length — by character count, word count, or sentence count. Add a custom suffix like "…" or "[read more]" and optionally preserve whole words so the cut never happens mid-word.
Characters cuts at an exact character position. Words keeps the first N words and drops the rest. Sentences keeps the first N complete sentences (ending with . ! or ?). Choose the mode that best suits your content type.
When enabled and using character mode, the truncator will not cut a word in the middle. Instead, it steps back to the previous space so no partial words appear in the result. This is highly recommended for user-facing copy.
Yes. Clear the suffix field or type anything up to 20 characters — for example [read more], ..., or leave it blank for a clean cut with no suffix appended.
Yes. All truncation is multibyte-safe and handles Unicode characters including CJK text, diacritics, and emoji without corrupting the string or miscounting characters.
Truncation is processed server-side via a lightweight PHP endpoint on the same domain, but no text is stored, logged, or retained. Results are returned immediately and discarded.
There is no enforced hard limit, but very large inputs (several MB of text) may be slow in the browser. For most practical use cases — blog posts, product descriptions, social content — the tool handles input instantly.
A text truncator is a tool that shortens a piece of text to a defined maximum length. Rather than simply cutting a string at an arbitrary position, a well-designed truncator respects natural language boundaries — keeping whole words intact, preserving complete sentences, and appending a configurable suffix such as an ellipsis ("…") to signal that content continues beyond the visible excerpt.
This online Text Truncator processes your input entirely in the browser pipeline: paste your text, set the mode and limit, and receive the trimmed result with a full stats breakdown in one click. No accounts, no file uploads, no waiting.
Truncation is one of those quiet, frequently overlooked requirements that surfaces in almost every project. Consider these common scenarios:
Not all truncation use cases are the same, which is why this tool offers three distinct modes:
Character mode is the most precise and is used when you have a hard character limit — database columns, API fields, or character-counted display areas like tweet composers. Combined with the "Preserve Whole Words" option, character mode produces clean, readable output that never cuts a word in the middle.
Word mode is ideal for article teasers, card descriptions, and anywhere the reading experience matters more than a strict character count. Specifying "show only the first 30 words" of a blog post gives a natural-feeling excerpt regardless of how long individual words are.
Sentence mode is the most semantically aware option. It splits text on sentence-ending punctuation (period, exclamation mark, question mark) and keeps only the first N complete sentences. This is particularly useful for generating introductions, summary excerpts, or preview paragraphs that read as finished thoughts rather than interrupted fragments.
When truncation removes content, readers benefit from a clear visual signal that more exists. The horizontal ellipsis ("…") is the most universally understood convention — it appears in literature, journalism, and UI design alike. However, different contexts call for different suffixes:
… — standard ellipsis, ideal for inline text and UI components... — three plain dots, sometimes preferred in code contexts or plain text[read more] — explicit CTA, common in blog cards and article teasers[...] — editorial style, used in quoted excerpts and academic writingThis tool lets you type any custom suffix up to 20 characters, so you can match the convention of your project without editing the output manually.
In character mode, a naive truncator cuts at exactly the Nth character — which often falls in the middle of a word. "truncation" truncated to 6 chars becomes "trunc", which is meaningless to readers. With the "Preserve Whole Words" option enabled, the truncator steps back from the character boundary to the previous whitespace, ensuring the last visible word is always complete. The character count of the result may be slightly less than the specified limit, but the text always reads naturally.
Many truncation implementations written in JavaScript or PHP operate on byte count rather than character count, which silently corrupts multibyte characters — Chinese, Japanese, Korean glyphs, Arabic script, emoji, and accented characters can all be split at the wrong byte boundary, producing garbled output or invalid strings. This tool uses PHP's mb_strlen and mb_substr functions throughout, which are fully multibyte-aware and correctly count every Unicode code point as a single character regardless of how many bytes it occupies in UTF-8.
Using the tool is straightforward. Paste your text into the input field on the left. Select a truncation mode from the dropdown — Characters, Words, or Sentences. Enter your desired limit in the numeric field. Optionally edit the suffix or toggle the Whole Words option. Click Truncate. The output panel shows the result alongside a stats summary: original character count, result character count, and the percentage reduction achieved. Use the Copy All button to copy the result to your clipboard in one click.
For meta descriptions, set mode to Characters, limit to 155, enable Whole Words, and use "…" as the suffix. For tweet text, set limit to 280 and leave suffix empty since you may not want to signal truncation. For product card descriptions, word mode with a limit of 20–30 words gives consistent, natural-reading excerpts. For sentence-based teasers, sentence mode with a limit of 2–3 captures the hook of any article without cutting mid-thought.
All text you paste into this tool is sent only to the JLV DevTools server for processing, returned immediately as the truncated result, and never stored, logged, analyzed, or used for any purpose. We do not use cookies for tracking. The tool is entirely stateless — closing the tab discards all input with no trace.