When working with text it is convenient and common to want to truncate
strings to make them fit a desired context. E.g., you might have a menu
that is only 100px wide and prefer text doesn't wrap so you'd truncate
it around 15-30 characters, depending on preference and typeface size.
This is trivial with plain text and substr but with HTML it is somewhat
difficult because whitespace has fluid significance and open tags that
are not properly closed destroy well-formedness and can wreck an entire
layout.

HTML::Truncate attempts to account for those two problems by padding
truncation for spacing and entities and closing any tags that remain
open at the point of truncation.

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTML-Truncate/