Put simply, I want to shorten text from a FB post to a limit of 500 characters and if it is shortened, add “ …” at the end. Yet for some reason this isn’t matching/replacing despite working in regex testers. There is no error and the full string is returned.
replace(7.message; “/(?<=.{500}) .+/gs”; " …")
Welcome to the Make community!
You should simply use the slice function and then manually append the ellipsis at the end.
Hope this helps! Let me know if there are any further questions or issues.
— @samliew
P.S.: Did you know, the concepts of about 70% of questions asked on this forum are already covered in the Make Academy. Investing some effort into it will save you lots of time and frustration using Make later!
That won’t work, because it will then ALWAYS add the ellipsis even if it wasn’t truncated.
The issue with this is Make’s replace function only accepts one regex flag at a time, and you’re using two.
I’ve already reported this bug a year ago.
You can use the if function to check the length of the string, and then truncate if necessary.
Ah! I am glad to know WHY it fails.
Do you have an example of using the if function in this way? I originally turned to regex replace after some other thread stating it wasn’t possible any other way, but that was years ago.
EDIT: The other reason for using regex was to not split it in the middle of a word…
Okay so I used substring temporarily just to get past a really long post that was holding up my queue, then tried some other things.
I can’t get if() to work right. I tried checking if length(7.message)>500 but it seems to ALWAYS evaluate to true. So it always adds ellipsis to the message.
I figured I would test your theory about multiple regex flags and I switched it from /gs to just /s but it still didn’t replace anything.
It has already been answered before, see
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Had another long post break my scenario again. Obviously editing this just to get past a long post each time is not ideal. The weird thing is, I’ve had this scenario for years and this problem (and non-functional regex replace) has only started in the last month. And I KNOW I tested it when I created it originally, and the replacement was working at the time.
I looked at your links and that’s great for not breaking in the middle of words. But it doesn’t solve “if” not working…
I don’t want to use a filter because there’s a lot of stuff going into the Discord embedded message that I don’t want to duplicate/maintain two separate versions just for message length!
bundle1.txt (4.9 KB)
bundle.json (14 Bytes)
blueprint.json (35.9 KB)
Okay… maybe this is why the if function doesn’t work? I don’t see a greater-than operator as an option.
The greater than operator is in the math tab (third).
