Setting a length limit to <p> elements

Question

What I need to accomplish is simple - set the limit of the length of paragraph elements to 60 characters. The jQuery script I have written is as follows:

$('p.classname').each(function(){
var paragraph = $(p.description).text();
var strlength = paragraph.length;
var maxlength = 60;
strlength < maxlength; 
});

I can still include more than 60 characters in the elements. How can I limit it to 60?

Answer 1

A simple approach using text() with a callback which loops though all elements in the same way each will:

$('p.classname').text(function(i, txt) {
    return txt ? txt.slice(0,60) : txt;
});

One major problem in your code is $('p.description').text(); will get text for all paragraphs in the page concatenated together. You need to isolate the instance of each paragraph. To do it within an each loop would be

$('p.description').each(function() {
    /* text for current paragraph */
    var text = $(this).text();
});

You are also using invalid selectors without quotes, and you never do anything with the text other than check its length.