# Excerpting a summary from my marked-up blog post without breaking html tags?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excerpting-a-summary-from-my-marked-up-blog-post-without-breaking-html-tags/143956>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 24, 2008, 5:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excerpting-a-summary-from-my-marked-up-blog-post-without-breaking-html-tags/143956 "2008-07-24T05:11:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2008, 5:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excerpting-a-summary-from-my-marked-up-blog-post-without-breaking-html-tags/143956/1 "2008-07-24T05:11:02Z")

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Hi there,

I’m working on a simple blog project. I’d like to automatically  
generate a 100 word excerpt of each article to display on the main  
page, and require the user to click on the article to read the whole  
thing. The problem is, if the hundredth word is in the middle of a  
block quote or a heading or something, the whole page gets messed up.  
What’s the easiest way to close any tags that might still be open at  
the end of the excerpt?

For what it’s worth, posts are marked up using textile and  
superredcloth.

Thanks for your help,

Andrew

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2008, 3:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/excerpting-a-summary-from-my-marked-up-blog-post-without-breaking-html-tags/143956/2 "2008-07-24T15:00:59Z")

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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 08:10:39PM -0700, removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote:

> I’m working on a simple blog project. I’d like to automatically  
> generate a 100 word excerpt of each article to display on the main  
> page, and require the user to click on the article to read the whole  
> thing. The problem is, if the hundredth word is in the middle of a  
> block quote or a heading or something, the whole page gets messed up.  
> What’s the easiest way to close any tags that might still be open at  
> the end of the excerpt?
> 
> For what it’s worth, posts are marked up using textile and  
> superredcloth.

When I had to do something like that I worked with the straight HTML,  
parsed by Hpricot. I then used #traverse\_text to count words until I  
reached the desired word count (i.e. counting only actual words, not  
tags),  
then truncated the text element I was on if necessary and deleting  
subsequent sibling elements on up the #parent chain.

> Thanks for your help,  
> Andrew  
> –Greg