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Use this function to pull the first n words from a string.

The incoming string is treated as a space-delimited array. Now we have an array with a word stored in each element. We can output it easily with an index loop, which we set to stop at the count value.

<cfscript>
function autoLeadIn(string,count) 
{
// define the return variable
output = '';
  if(Trim(string) NEQ '') 
  {
      textarray = ListToArray(string, ' '); 
      
      // if the textarray has less items than the count reset the count 
      if(ArrayLen(textarray) LTE count) 
        count = ArrayLen(textarray);

      // loop for the length of the count param		
      for(i=1; i LTE count; i=i+1) 
      { 
        // append each word to the return variable
        output = output & textarray[i];
	
        // if not at end, add a space to the return variable
	if(i neq count)
          output = output & ' ';
	 
      } // close loop
  } // end if
return output;
} // end autoLeadIn
</cfscript>

Considerations

If you're pulling a large chunk of text from a database, consider trimming it in your query before passing it to the function to increase performance.