While customizing my mt blog, I was wondering how to abbreviate long entry titles on particular places in a nice way. Well, mt provides template tag modifiers such as trim-to, but my aim was to do it more nicely, i.e. replacing anything behind the first three (or any other maximum) words by an ellipsis. For instance,

"more than three words"

"more than three ..."

The solution is a simple regex, of course. In Perl style,

s/ˆ(\S+(?:\s+\S+){2})(\s+\S+)+/$1 .../

<$mt:EntryTitle regex_replace="/ˆ(\S+(?:\s+\S+){2})(\s+\S+)+/","$1&ensp;&hellip;"$>