# How can I limit the \<td\> characters?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-can-i-limit-the-td-characters/135831>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 25, 2008, 1:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-can-i-limit-the-td-characters/135831 "2008-04-25T13:19:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![captaffy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f04885/32.png) [@captaffy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/captaffy)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2008, 1:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-can-i-limit-the-td-characters/135831/1 "2008-04-25T13:19:25Z")

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I have this code:

\<% for repair\_ticket in @repair\_tickets %\>

\<% end %\>

| \<%=\_('Client')%\> |
| --- |
| \<%=h repair\_ticket.client.name %\> |

I want only to show the first 10 letters of client.name. Can I do that  
only with HTML? Should I use Ruby?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![captaffy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/f04885/32.png) [@captaffy](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/captaffy)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2008, 1:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-can-i-limit-the-td-characters/135831/2 "2008-04-25T13:23:41Z")

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On 25 Apr 2008, at 12:19, John S. wrote:

> I want only to show the first 10 letters of client.name. Can I do that  
> only with HTML? Should I use Ruby?

rails has the truncate helper, so in this case  
truncate(repair\_ticket.client.name, 10)

Fred