Taking the first x number of words....

SpeedStick

Hi,

I'm working with a news program running off mySQL and I would like to take the first 75 words from each article and use it as an excerpt/preview. How could I go about doing this?

Thanks.

hessian

Well if you want to do it by words...

$Temp = split(" ", $Full_String);
for($i = 1; $i < 76; $++)
{
$Diplay .= $Temp[$i];
}

$Display is now just the first 75 words.

Or you could do it by characters.

for($i = 1; $i < 76; $i++)
{
$Display = $Full_String{$i};
}
$Display is just the first 75 characters.

SpeedStick

Thanks for the response hessian, but your method only displays the last (75th) word. I would like to display all of the first 75 words.

Thanks.

sarah

It concatonates (sp) each word of the array onto the last one, so it will actually print them all out. The only issue is that there are no spaces in between them. Just add a space and then trim the final result:

$Temp = split(" ", $Full_String); 
for($i = 1; $i < 75; $i++) { 
	$Display .= "$Temp[$i] ";
}
$Display=trim($Display);

timj

If you only get the 75th word, then you probably missed the "." (dot) in front of the assignment operator ("=") in the line
$Display .=...;

"." does the actual concatenation.
"$a .= $b" just means $a=$a . $b (append $b to $a via concatenation of $b at the end of the already present string in $a).

ThaSpY

I am doing something similar. I want to return the first 15 characters from a variable. How would I do this? (Sorry I'm a noob) 😃

tekky

Originally posted by ThaSpY
I am doing something similar. I want to return the first 15 characters from a variable. How would I do this? (Sorry I'm a noob) 😃

echo substr($string, 0,15);

tekky

Originally posted by hessian
Well if you want to do it by words...

$Temp = split(" ", $Full_String);
for($i = 1; $i < 76; $++)
{
$Diplay .= $Temp[$i];
}

$Display is now just the first 75 words.

Or you could do it by characters.

for($i = 1; $i < 76; $i++)
{
$Display = $Full_String{$i};
}
$Display is just the first 75 characters.

Not quite... you'll get the first 75 starting at the 2nd word doing it that way...
remember... numerically index'd arrays ALWAYS have a 0 indice.

so 0-74 is 75 words.... 😉

you would want to do

for($i=0;$i<75;$i++)
{
     $result .= $array[$i];
}
echo "first 75 words are: $result";

ThaSpY

ok so in regards to my question. to take it one step further.. i want it to cut off a certain amount. not how many charaters to keep, but a measurement (eg pixels) because the letter "i" is smaller than the letter "m" and i want all the variables to be cut to the exact same length.

eg: if i just cut to 15 characters, thats not enough because it will return this:

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
iiiiiiiiiiiiiii

and i want this:

mmmm
iiiiiiiiiiiiiii

understand what i mean?
thanks for your help

timj

The width of your characters is very font dependent. Are you sure you want to make a PHP script that works only with certain fonts? (eg you can't really control which font a client's browser uses - if you plan to use your tool in a website).

You can cut off a certain amount of characters (but I'm not sure as how you would calculate such an amount depending on font) by using the substr( ) function.
E.g. if you want to cut off the last 5 chars because they make your string too "wide" (in pixels), use something like:
$str=substr($str,0,strlen($str)-5);
But you'll still need a function to calculate the pixelwidth of your string...