Limit the length of output

[sactown]

Hi,

I was wondering if their was a way to chop of any text that was over a certain limit, and and a "..." for more details. The information is being outputed is coming from an array.

For example (Limit to 33 characters and spaces and add 3 dots):

Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested...

Or a way to limit the output by the number of words. By limiting the text, let say to 33 characters, it might cut off and add "..." to the middle of some words.

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks

[br__ken]

$str="really long str with more than thirty three chars";
$max=33;
$modstr=((strlen($str)>$max)?substr($str,0,$max) . "..." : $str);
echo $modstr;

i made it modstr so $str retains its value, incase you need it for anything

to retain full words, this worked pretty good

// it seems like the script is needed for important things =)
$str="Two members of the senate were found smoking crack yesterday morning";
$max=33;

$words=explode(" ",$str);
for($i=0;$i<count($words);$i++)
{ 
	static $char_count=0, $outstr="";
	$char_count+=strlen($words[$i]);
	if($char_count<=$max)
		$outstr.=$words[$i] . " ";
	else{
		$outstr.="...";
		continue 1;
	}
}
echo $outstr;

play with those i guess 😃

since im bored and have nothing else to do: heres that in function form

function shorten($str,$max=33,$buffer="...")
{
	$words=explode(" ",$str);
	for($i=0;$i<count($words);$i++)
	{ 
		static $char_count=0, $outstr="";
		$char_count+=strlen($words[$i]);
		if($char_count<=$max)
			$outstr.=$words[$i] . " ";
		else{
			$outstr.=$buffer;
			continue 1;
		}
	}
	return $outstr;
}
// example 
echo shorten($str,33,".,.");