A small utility to count characters, autolink, and shorten posts to an acceptable tweet-length summary.

This is a port of the Python module of the same name. Please refer to https://github.com/kylewm/brevity for documentation.

With npm, simply npm install brevity.

Otherwise, brevity.js is a single file that can be included anywhere. In the browser, it will define window.brevity with the functions below. `

Find out how many characters a message will use on Twitter with tweetLength():

var brevity = require("brevity");
var length = brevity.tweetLength('Published my first npm www.npmjs.com/package/brevity and composer packagist.org/packages/kylewm/brevity packages today!');
console.log(length);  // 99

This text is 119 characters but, due to t.co wrapping, will only use 99 characters.

Convert URLs in plaintext to HTML links.

var brevity = require("brevity");
var html = brevity.autolink("I'm a big fan of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series) (and its creator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joss_Whedon)");
console.log(html);

Note that brevity handles parentheses and other punctuation as you'd expect.

The shorten(text) function takes a message of any length and shortens it to a Tweet-length 140 characters, adding an ellipsis at the end of it is truncated. It will not truncate a word or URL in the middle. Shorten takes a few optional parameters that change the way the tweet is formed. Any of these parameters can be null.

• permalink - included after the ellipsis if and only if the text is shortened. Must be a URL or false.
• shortpermalink - included in parentheses at the end of tweets that are not shortened. Must be a URL or false.
• shortpermacitation - included in parentheses at the end of tweets that are not shortened. Must not be a URL, e.g. ttk.me t4fT2
• targetLength - The target length for the final text. Defaults to 140.
• linkLength - The final length of each URL after shortening. Defaults to 23.
• formatAsTitle - take the text as a title of a longer article. Always formats as "Title: $permalink" or "Title… $permalink" if shortened.

var brevity = require("brevity");
var permalink = "https://kylewm.com/2016/01/brevity-shortens-notes";
var longnote = "Brevity (github.com/kylewm/brevity-php) shortens notes that are too long to fit in a single tweet. It can also count characters to help you make sure your note won't need to be shortened!";
var tweet = brevity.shorten(longnote, permalink);
console.log(tweet);