# Prob **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [August 29, 2006, 12:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prob/66794 "2006-08-29T12:06:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![harper](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@harper](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/harper)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2006, 12:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prob/66794/1 "2006-08-29T12:06:17Z")
Hi, there is a problem i’ve been trying to solve for a couple of hours now, and after some useless googeling and searching around, i haven’t come up with anything substansial - i thought the forum might help me. say i have a string and want to display only the first 10 characters or so: shortstring = “this is a very long string object”[0…10] # shortstring = "this is a " # which is great but if i use the same method on a utf8 string, i get some weird characters popping in there, sometimes yes, sometimes no. from looking around it seems that because every character is two bytes(as apposed to 1 in regular encoding) there is sometimes a sum of odd/even characters, and then the [0…10] doesn’t work correctly, populating wierd characters. (same deal goes for the String#slice method) the final result i need, in essence of this message is this: “very long string in utf8” to become “very lon…” without weird characters. any help, much appreciated. thanks, harp ---
**Author:** ![harper](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@harper](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/harper)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2006, 12:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prob/66794/2 "2006-08-29T12:44:55Z")
Have you tried TextHelper#truncate? > **[ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#M000505)** > > The TextHelper module provides a set of methods for filtering, formatting and transforming strings, which can reduce the amount of inline Ruby code in your views. ---
**Author:** ![harper](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@harper](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/harper)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2006, 3:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prob/66794/3 "2006-08-29T15:29:16Z")
harper wrote: > say i have a string and want to display only the first 10 characters or > so: > > shortstring = “this is a very long string object”[0…10] > > # shortstring = "this is a " # which is great > > but if i use the same method on a utf8 string, i get some weird > characters popping in there, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Neither Ruby nor Rails natively supports UTF-8. The built-in string functions are assuming single-byte characters, which is why it’s returning weird results for the double-byte characters in your UTF-8 string. This page on the wiki may help: [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings](http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings) Chris