string manipulation with PHP

[artoo]

Hi,

How can I start searching for the first space in a string while starting at
say the 150th character? I'm trying to display the first 150 characters of
an article that is stored in a LONGTEXT filed of a MYSQL database, and
should the 150th character be inside a word, I would want to finish
displaying that word.

For example supose the 150th character is the v in the word "privileges" I
would want to finish displaying the word and end with "privileges" rather
then ending with"priv"

thanks
[e-mail]

[laserlight]

this might be a possible method:

$string = "some long string of more than 150 characters ... privileges ...";
//get the first 150 chars
$display_str = substr($string, 0, 150);
//add to this string while within a word
$len = strlen($string);
for ($i = 150; $i < $len; $i++) {
	if ($string{$i} == ' ') {
		break;
	}
	else {
		$display_str .= $string{$i};
	}
}
//now $display_str should be usable

[Mordecai]

wordwrap() is what you're looking for, methinks. You could use this (broken apart at the first \n) to get the first 150ish characters.

[Weedpacket]

You could just use @strpos($string, ' ', 150) to find the space you're looking for. The @ is to suppress the warning that is reported if the string is less than 150 characters long (the function returns false in that case).