show text abstract in discussion group post

[Tom Donovan]

I'll start with a minimal answer:  Assuming your script is already set up to
access the other parts of the message and the message body is in the
variable "msgBody", you can use this to get the first 200 chars (along with
an ellipsis):

    string.ellipsize(msgBody,200)

Tom


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Donovan                                Hawthorn School District 73
Coord. of Info. Systems, Webmaster         Vernon Hills, IL
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On 12/19/02 11:35 AM, "Joshua Lipton/Slowtrain" <joshua at theslowtrain.com>
wrote:

> Alright... here's a poser that my limited (but growing by leaps and bounds)
> Frontier/Manila knowledge has me stuck at.
> In my discussion group, I want to in let's say the topic list show the first
> 200 characters of the post.
> 
> My example:
> 
> --------START EXAMPLE------------------------
> 
> Topic: (this is where the subject goes - I have this right)
> Posted by (author - again, I have this)
> On (date - I''ve got this right too)
> Total Messages (got it) | Reads (got this too)
> 
> (this is the part that I need help implementing) This is the first 200
> characters of the post and this is what makes me so very interested that I
> actually bother to click on this particular link instead of the myriad of
> other posts. It helps me as a user figure out not just from the subject, but
> from the beginning of the body whether I should waste my valuable time on
> clicking into this .... (end the part that I need to figure out)
> 
> -------END EXAMPLE----------------------------
> 
> Your help is totally appreciated... if this is so involved that you would
> have to do extensive work to accomplish this, let me know how much it takes
> and I could try to work something out, but in the spirit of my small
> checkbook, I'm really hoping someone has done this before.
> 
> Thanks!
> Joshua Lipton
> slowtrain
> 
>