CodeFrenzy

In my chosen career, I solve problems everyday. Sometimes the problems I’m given are small and simple to solve, and sometimes they are most definitely not. That, I can deal with. What annoys me is when a problem seems like it should only take five or so minutes to solve and yet somehow, it takes you all day. It’s not that you’re bad at what you do, it’s just that the thing you’re trying to do wasn’t quite as simple as you or anyone else had thought it would be. Or perhaps the framework you’re working with has some nasty little quirks that you weren’t aware of. Or perhaps the thing you’re trying to do just hasn’t been done before, or at least hasn’t been well documented. Whatever the reason, spending all day on a “simple problem” isn’t good for your sanity and makes you feel like you ought to be doing COMP101 all over again.

One such problem that I’ve come across more than once in the last few weeks is how to make a text string fit inside a label or other similar control. If the string is too long to fit, the end should be truncated and replaced by an ellipsis. Sounds pretty straightforward eh? Nope, think again.

After coming up with a few complicated solutions including but not limited to iterating through every character in the string and measuring the length of the string (yes, highly inefficient, I know!), I finally found a solution which seems to do the trick. I feel this amazing solution needs to be shared with everyone so here it is:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

private string textToDraw = "Hello, how are you? Why does this string not fit in the label that I have drawn? Maybe it is because it is too long?";
 
public Form1()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    label1.Text = ShortenString(textToDraw, this.Width - 10, label1.Font);
}
 
public string ShortenString(string myString, int width, Font font)
{
    string result = string.Copy(myString);
    TextRenderer.MeasureText(result, font, new Size(width, 0), TextFormatFlags.EndEllipsis | TextFormatFlags.ModifyString);
 
    return result;
}
 
private void Form1_ResizeEnd(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // Set the width to something - I've just set it to the width of the form - 10 to allow for the ellipsis but
    // I guess this would need to depend on which control the label is to be displayed inside of
    int width = this.Width - 10;
    label1.Text = ShortenString(textToDraw, width, label1.Font);
}

The trick to solving this problem was to use the TextRenderer class and calling its MeasureText function. MeasureText doesn’t seem like the most obvious function to use but it seems to work.

Note that this example is for a C# winforms application. The same could be done for a web application although you’d have to use JavaScript to re-calculate the string when the browser or element is resized.

Has anyone else ever had to solve this particular problem? If so, I’m interested to hear how you did it!