Parsing text by whole words onto lines with character limits?

[ratty]

Is there an example of this that anyone knows of? I'm trying to have a program load any random .txt file and break it into different lines with character limits without breaking apart whole words. It's the breaking up whole words bit that I'm having trouble with. It doesn't matter if the extracted lines end up in a different object or are in the same one that loaded the .txt to begin with.

For example, a 12 character limit of "Today is Friday, May 9th." results in:

Today is Fri
day, May 9th
.

I would like it to end up as:

Today is
Friday, May
9th.


As always, any help is greatly, greatly appreciated.

[Jahkri]

Hi Ratty, perhaps it' s possible by using the Regex-Object. I have to admit that i haven' t used it (so far) and it looks complicated too. Anyway, i' ll post an example if i can figure Regex out...

With kind regards,

jahkri

[ratty]

I've got it! Well, just about. This works great except for one small thing. Punctuation breaks words apart, even in the case of apostrophes. Figuring out how to keep touching punctuation as part of the word which precedes it is the last thing to figure out here. I have no clue where to begin. I've used this to load documents which aren't punctuation heavy and it works great!

Check out the attached file. You just need to add which file it loads on frame start and the rest should be pretty straight forward. For an example that contains a TON of punctuation, load the attached .txt file.


wordwrap parser.mfa
Snows of Kilimanjaro.txt

[ratty]

Ouch! Just realized this causes issues if the .txt file loaded is in paragraph form or just a hard returned list of things...

[Jahkri]

Hi Ratty, are you using the Regular-Expressions-Object to achieve this? (Sorry, i was not able yet to watch the Demos you posted). In the Regular-Expressions-Object, there' s an Option called "Treat Text as Sinle Line. This Option should turn the Text-Data to a Single-Line Text (which should get rid of the paragraphs / hard-returned Lists).

With kind regards,
jahkri

[ratty]

I have absolutely no knowledge on how to harness the Regular Expressions Object. Perhaps it's time to try if that's the only way to pull this off.

[Jahkri]

Hi Ratty, there are also some Examples of the Regular-Expressions-Object but i could not find a "direct" Help-File for the Object. I found that Web-Page (via Google) that seems to explain it quite understandable, but it still seems to be a science on it' s own :P Here' s the Link to that Webpage: http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

Anyway, if i figure it out, i' ll let You know and will post a commented Example.

Good Luck to You too with the Regular-Expressions-Object.

By the Way, perhaps somebody on the Forum already knows how Regex works (some of the Programmer-Guys), would be nice if somebody could shed some Light on this Topic.

with kind regards, jahkri

[ratty]

Oh! I have an idea I should try out.

For the punctuation issue, Instead of having an action that moves X characters in, then to the beginning of whatever word it is, I'll have it move X characters in and then move back to the last space! That should work, I think. I just have to figure out how to program it.

Now I just need to also come up with some sort of loop that first detects if each line in the txt file only has a single word on it, or a sentence. That will also fix another issue.

This discussion has been enlightening!