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Show HN: UI pattern for truncating long integers/strings in tables (github.com)
3 points by jessekorzan 3026 days ago
1 comments
kwillets 3026 days ago
This looks good, but it reminds me of a problem I've noticed in this situation: the truncated cells have virtually no information.

Take this example data:

    999995
    999998
    999999
Imagine we have 5 display digits available; the default method is to display

    99999
    99999
    99999
But it might be better to show the distinguishing digit. eg:

    99..5
    99..8
    99..9
However I don't know what the best design or display pattern for that would be.
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jessekorzan 3026 days ago
Nice eye. Thanks for this... good enhancement. A good option for display, as it depends on what kind of numbers are being displayed and compared (fractions vs. big whole numbers).
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kwillets 3026 days ago
In my case I was thinking of long strings such as SQL queries. We would show a few initial words, but in SQL they're typically the same.

For example:

    select sum(sales) from tablexyz where region = 'West'             
    select sum(sales) from tablexyz where region = 'South'
In this case I think we want the distinguishing word or token, and we can fill the remaining space with text from the left, eg "select sum(sales)..'South'".

I could write out some javascript for this, but IANA front-end or css expert.

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