length-safe substring ?

Hi,

When trying to display the first N characters of a string, not knowing the size of said string, in my template, I'm doing this:
[#assign foo='a fairly short string']

${foo?right_pad(50)?substring(0, 50)?trim}

This seems rather cumbersome, wouldn't you agree? Another option would be to use if blocks; not much more readable.

So what I'm asking:
- is there a simpler/shorter way of doing the same ?
- if not, would a new built-in make sense ? Or changing the behavior of the existing one to be more lenient than its java.lang.String equivalent ?

Cheers,

-g



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