ASP.NET MVC SubString help

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC app that shows news articles and for the main paragraph I have a truncate and HTML tag stripper. e.g. <p><%= item.story.RemoveHTMLTags().Truncate() %></p>

The two functions are from an extension and are as follows:

public static string RemoveHTMLTags(this string text)
{
    return Regex.Replace(text, @"<(.|\n)*?>", string.Empty);
}
public static string Truncate(this string text)
{
    return text.Substring(0, 200) + "...";
}

However when I create a new article say with a story with only 3-4 words it will throw this error: Index and length must refer to a location within the string. Parameter name: length

What is the problem? Thanks

Answer 1

Change your truncate function to this:

public static string Truncate(this string text) 
{     
    if(text.Length > 200)
    {
        return text.Substring(0, 200) + "..."; 
    }
    else
    {
        return text;
    }

} 

A much more useful version would be

public static string Truncate(this string text, int length) 
{     
    if(text.Length > length)
    {
        return text.Substring(0, length) + "..."; 
    }
    else
    {
        return text;
    }

}