What's the quickest way to truncate paragraph text that may or may not include HTML elements?

Question

I need to truncate paragraph text that may or may not include HTML tags. I\'m looking for the most efficient way to do this with straight jQuery or vanilla javascript. You c

Answer 1

One possibility for this kind of situation is to temporarily convert the data being truncated to text.

Send the HTML to a throwaway element and then extract the text:

var title = $('
').html(text).text();

This is some text with a link becomes This is some text with a link, which can then be truncated safely.

If you need to expand that to the original text again, just keep a copy with the HTML still in it.

Here is an example: http://jsfiddle.net/B2AZA/