textwrap.shorten()

textwrap.shorten(text, width, **kwargs)

Collapse and truncate the given text to fit in the given width.

First the whitespace in text is collapsed (all whitespace is replaced by single spaces). If the result fits in the width, it is returned. Otherwise, enough words are dropped from the end so that the remaining words plus the placeholder fit within width:

>>> textwrap.shorten("Hello  world!", width=12)
'Hello world!'
>>> textwrap.shorten("Hello  world!", width=11)
'Hello [...]'
>>> textwrap.shorten("Hello world", width=10, placeholder="...")
'Hello...'

Optional keyword arguments correspond to the instance attributes of TextWrapper, documented below. Note that the whitespace is collapsed before the text is passed to the TextWrapper fill() function, so changing the value of tabsize, expand_tabs, drop_whitespace, and replace_whitespace will have no effect.