overflow hidden on a Paragraph in Reportlab
<p>I have a <code>Table</code> with 2 cells, inside of each one there is a <code>Paragraph</code></p>

<pre><code>from reportlab.platypus import Paragraph, Table, TableStyle
from reportlab.lib.styles import ParagraphStyle
from reportlab.lib.units import cm

table_style_footer = TableStyle(
            [
                ('LEFTPADDING', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 0),
                ('RIGHTPADDING', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 0),
                ('TOPPADDING', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 0),
                ('BOTTOMPADDING', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 0),
                ('BOX', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 1, (0, 0, 0)),
                ('VALIGN', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 'TOP'),
            ]
        )

style_p_footer = ParagraphStyle('Normal')
style_p_footer.fontName = 'Arial'
style_p_footer.fontSize = 8
style_p_footer.leading = 10

Table([
       [
        Paragraph('Send To:', style_p_footer), 
        Paragraph('Here should be a variable with long content', style_p_footer)
       ]
      ],
      [1.7 * cm, 4.8 * cm],
      style=table_style_footer
     )
</code></pre>

<p>I need hide the overflow content of paragraph , but the paragraph instead of hide the overflow content does a break line.</p>

<p>Reportlab doesn't seem to have a native support for hiding overflow, but we can achieve it by utilizing the <code>breakLines</code> function of a <code>Paragraph</code>. The <code>breakLines</code> functions returns an object that contains all the lines of the paragraph given a certain width, thus we can also use it to find the first line and discard everything else.</p>

<p>Basically we need to do the following:</p>

<ol>
<li>Create a dummy paragraph</li>
<li>Fetch the lines of the dummy</li>
<li>Create a the actual paragraph based on the first line of the dummy</li>
</ol>

<p>Doing this in code looks like this:</p>

<pre><code># Create a dummy paragraph to see how it would split
long_string = 'Here should be a variable with long content'*10
long_paragraph = Paragraph(long_string, style_p_footer)

# Needed because of a bug in breakLines (value doesn't matter)
long_paragraph.width = 4.8 * cm

# Fetch the lines of the paragraph for the given width
para_fragment = long_paragraph.breakLines(width=4.8 * cm)

# There are 2 kinds of returns so 2 ways to grab the first line
if para_fragment.kind == 0:
    shorted_text = " ".join(para_fragment.lines[0][1])
else:
    shorted_text = " ".join([w.text for w in para_fragment.lines[0].words])

# To make it pretty add ... when we break of the sentence
if len(para_fragment.lines) &gt; 1:
    shorted_text += "..."

# Create the actual paragraph
shorted_paragraph = Paragraph(shorted_text, style_p_footer)
</code></pre>

python python-3.x reportlab platypus