How to truncate a post for display purposes

Hi

I’m currently using the below code to display the latest 2 posts from the ‘news’ category in the sidebar.

<h2>Latest News</h2>
<ul><?php $temp_query = $wp_query; ?>
<?php query_posts('cat=3&showposts=2'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php $wp_query = $temp_query; ?></ul>

I would like to be able to truncate long posts to 50 characters in the side bar, add automatically add an ellipsis (…) with a ‘click here for more’ hyperlink. Is this possible?