string string, cut my string

[Anon]

Ok,

I have a string of text 250 charicters long. I want to display the first 50 charicters only.

Keep in mind that sometimes, there may be only 25 charicters, so it needs to not fail there.

Anyone know how to do this?

Basically I want to take a long bit of text, such as this paragraph right here, and make it look like this:

Basically I want to take a long bit of ...

[stevenrhiggins]

Since your string length is variable you should find the length with strlen. strlen counts all the characters including spaces, punctuation etc.

strlen($string)

Once you know the length of the string you can divide it any number of characters you need with substr.
Characters in a string begin at 0. You can also start at the end of a string by using a negative number.

substr($string,5) or substr($string,-5)

[Anon]

$mystring = substr("$mystring", 0, 50);
should do it for you

then you can add the three dots like this

$mystring .= "..."