Javascript: Truncate a paragraph to maxLength characters. It does not break a single words. ellipseText is optional (default: … ) It will not work on characters that are not a letter A-Z or number. It backtracks until there is a space and add the ellipseText.

truncText.js

      function truncText (text, maxLength, ellipseText){
        ellipseText = ellipseText || '…';
       
        if (text.length < maxLength) 
            return text;

        //Find the last piece of string that contain a series of not A-Za-z0-9_ followed by A-Za-z0-9_ starting from maxLength
        var m = text.substr(0, maxLength).match(/([^A-Za-z0-9_]*)[A-Za-z0-9_]*$/);
        if(!m) return ellipseText;
        
        //Position of last output character
        var lastCharPosition = maxLength-m[0].length;
        
        //If it is a space or "[" or "(" or "{" then stop one before. 
        if(/[\s\(\[\{]/.test(text[lastCharPosition])) lastCharPosition--;
        
        //Make sure we do not just return a letter..
        return (lastCharPosition ? text.substr(0, lastCharPosition+1) : '') + ellipseText;
      }

Thank you very much!