breaking a large amount of text into several parts...

listenmirndt

so I have a large amount of text,

that I can't put into a single variable,

so I need to break it apart into smaller pieces, say, every 1000 characters...

how would I do this?

laserlight

You should be able to put "a large amount of text" into a single variable.

So, why do you need to break the text into smaller pieces? There are many ways of doing this, and knowing the reason will help us suggest the appropriate methods.

laserlight

You should be able to put "a large amount of text" into a single variable.

So, why do you need to break the text into smaller pieces? There are many ways of doing this, and knowing the reason will help us suggest the appropriate methods.

listenmirndt

Because I need to send this data to Google Translate,
and Google Translate seems to have a limit on number of characters (or maybe the URL query string has a limit)

either way, I need to break apart the main body of text into separate variables,
so that I can transmit each section individually,
then I can piece together the returned translated data and re-assemble the parts of the main text into a single piece again....

thanks for the reply!

laserlight

You could make use of [man]wordwrap/man to help you here.

johanafm

listenmirndt;11010741 wrote:
and Google Translate seems to have a limit on number of characters (or maybe the URL query string has a limit)

There are limits to URL query string length. But as far as I remember, they are not part of the standard. Instead, they are web server implementation specfic. If you search the web you'll most likely find out what this limit is.

However, if you look at the HTML source of translate.google.com, it says method="post". While they use ajax to automatically send the text to be translated and modifiy their url accordingly, I'd still try a post request and see if that works. They may still have an input limit, but it's worth a try.

NogDog

Also, arbitrarily breaking the text at a convenient word boundary will more than likely cause translation errors, since much of human language is very context-sensitive. At the very least, if you do have to break it up, you should probably look for ways to break it up into whole sentences or paragraphs.