Making a News Section...help!

Anon

I am in the process of making a "News Section" for my site. What I am trying to figure outis this; is there a way to have PHP count the amount of characters in the "article", and automatically create an "abstract" that is displayed on the front page?

Any insights wold be greatly appreciated.

Anon

On your first point, read the fine manual, Chapter LV:

http://www.php.net/manual/ref.strings.php

On your second point, if you want a well-crafted abstract, write one. If you want the first sentence or first paragraph, consult the manual's entries on strings, regular expressions, and Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Anon

Steve, I appreciate the reply, however I found the answer elsewhere, so I am submitting it here to all that would read it.

First you have to determine the maximum length you'd like for the abstract. Then, using substr(), you can grab that much of the string. Of course, this might be the middle of the word so you can use strrpos() to get the position of the last space. Then use substr() again to grab everything until that space.
function Abstract($text,$length)
{
$text=substr($text,0,$length);
$lastspacepos=strrpos($text,' ');
return substr($text,0,$lastspacepos);
}

You can call this like:

$abstract=Abstract($full_story_text,255);