Is there a render function to limit characters displayed in a field in table view?

I have a table with half a dozen fields to display in table view. One of these is a comments field which could be a few words to a Michener novel. In PHP I can do something like:

$text = substr ($text,0,80);
if ( strlen ($text > 80 ) ) { $text = "$text ..."; }

An example please how to do this in datatables?

Bt the way, just wondering which formatting editor you are using here in the forum.