Breaking a line on a word

[Michael Hertel]

Mission:

Format a blob of text to many lines that do not exceed 75 chars in length and doesn’t split up a word.

Either I was dreaming, or I thought there was a command that used a switch like -word to parse on whitespace.

I can’t find the command though.

Topic

[Chris Williams]

I have some tcl code that does what you want. EM me if you’d like a copy.

[David Barr]

You’re probably thinking of the unix “fold” command.

[Tom Rioux]

Michael,

If you type in the following command:

string wordstart $msg 75

It will return the index at the start of the word before the 75th character (including spaces and punctuation).  If you subtract 1 from the index number that is returned, that will be the last whitespace before the 75th character.   Remember that the count starts at 0 so if it returns a “72” then the whitespace will be at index 71.  From there you can use iteration and a string range command to do the manipulating to bust it up into lines.   The 75 can even be set as counter that is incremented (i.e 75, 150 etc)

Hope this helps…

Tom Rioux

[Michael Hertel]

Perfect. Thanks Tom!

Chris, thanks too!

[Dennis Pfeifer]

;##how about text util .. .

package require textutil

;## assume ‘text’ is in $text

set textList [split [textutil::adjust $text -length 75] “n”]

;## textList now contains a list

;## with each element containing one line of text.

;## Dennis..

[Author]

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