Returning X amount of words from a string

Anon

Hi i'm writting an aritcle script and on the main page of the site i want to display like intros of the articles... like the first 25 words lets say. then have user click a like to read the rest of the story.

how can this be done?

-thanks

Anon

Where is the article to be stored, If you read the article into your script somehow and then assign it as a string to a variable. You could split it into an array delimited by blank spaces.

$article = explode(" ", $articlestring);

for ($i=0,$i<25;$i++) {
$shortarticle = $shortarticle . " " . $shortarticle[$i];
}

//This will print the new string
print $shortarticle;

Anon

I've seen what you're talking about, but don't know if there is any one best way of doing it. I'd suggest getting the text of the article into one long string '$myarticle' using the filesytem functions. Then I'd use the php string function explode(" ", $myarticle) to get an array with all the words in the article. You might have to find out if there are <=25 or >25 elements in the array before doing the next step. Anyway, then use the php array function array_slice($myarticle, 0, 25) to get an array with only 25 words. Then use implode function on this array to finally get a string of 25 words from the article. array_slice was added in PHP4, but you can implement it yourself if you don't have PHP3.

Anon

your suggestions worked great!!!
thank you all very much!

-wes

Anon

Here ya go... this works good for beginnings, but not full words....

<?php

function makeDots($text,$length) {
$text = substr($text,0,$length);
$lstsppos = strrpos($text,"");
return substr($text,0,$lstsppos);
}

$story = "Since a week I've discovered PHP. On this site I found a script for creating abstracts from full articles";
print makeDots($story,60) . "...";

Andrew Heebner