using substr and whole words

[zenweezil]

I have a variable for a story headline that I want to shorten to under 30 characters, but want it to end after a complete word.

So I can shorten to 30 characters with this:

$shorthead = substr ($headline, 0, 30);

But how do I modify to have it cut off after a word ends?

Any ideas?

[dswimboy]

i would use regular expressions. something like this to chop off that last part of a word:

$headline =~ s/ \S$//;

this removes the last space followed by non-whitespace at the end of the line. if the headline is exactly 30 letters long, it will remove that last full word, however. thus, i would do something like this:
if ($shorthead = substr ($headline, 0, 30);) {
$shorthead =~ s/ \S$//;
}

[zenweezil]

I tried this code:

$shorthead = substr ($headline, 0, 30)
$shorthead =~ s/ \S$//;

But the line $shorthead =~ s/ \S$//; made no change to the $shorthead varaible and did not chop off the broken word.

I also tried just this line to the orginal headline:

$headline=~ s/ \S$//;

But again there was no change to the $headline varaible and did not chop off at the end of a word.

I also unsuccessfully tried:
if ($shorthead = substr ($headline, 0, 30)) {
$shorthead =~ s/ \S$//;
}

Is this expression correct: $shorthead =~ s/ \S$//;

[dswimboy]

ah! i forgot something. try adding a star, like this:
$shorthead =~ s/ \S*$//;

[zenweezil]

I also found another way to just grab the first few words with an array:

($FirstWord, $SecondWord, $ThirdWord, $FourthWord, $FifthWord, $RestOfSentence) = split(/ /, $headline, 6) ;