cropping a string when it reaches a " "

designcurb

I'm looking to trim the news stories on the front page of a site for the user to click the title to read the full story. I want the string to stop when it reaches the first in the story, and echo the new cropped string. The idea being, rather than cropping the text to a set amount of characters with the usual '...' to finish it we have a completed paragraph to entice the reader.

Any ideas?

Cheers from a newbie

laserlight

might be able to use regex for that, e.g. preg_match() that matches until the first

Anarchyh

Yeah ... find the first location of " " or " " if you are using xhtml using the function "strripos", then substr the string from 0 to (value returned by strripos) ... i.e

$newsPost = 'Hi, here is a sample newspost to test cropping by html linebreak<br> Mooooooooooo!!!!';

$pos = strripos($newsPost, "<br>");

if ($pos === false)
   echo $newsPost;
else
   echo substr($newsPost, 0, $pos);

Preg would be total overkill for something as simple as that & a major slowdown since all regex functions are intensely slow. Avoid using regex if you can get away with a simpler alternative to do what you want it to do.

designcurb

Cheers all, it works a treat.

Heres the final code, for anybody to use:

// Trim that fat text down baby!
$homeBodyTrim = ($news->Value("storyBody"));

$homeBodyTrimed = ($homeBodyTrim);

$newsPost = ($homeBodyTrimed);

$pos = strpos($newsPost,"<br>");

if($pos === false)
{
echo $newsPost;
}
else
{
echo substr($newsPost,0,$pos);
}