Only limited amount of letters from a text

TheBeginner

Hi,

If I have a text of lets say 250 letters and would like to only have a string of maximum 25 letters and the last word should not be divided - how to do that?

Example:

My text:
"On the 26th may 2003, i went to one of the best concerts that i have been to in some little while. i go to quite a few concerts as a rule, and some friends of mine had become slightly overly obsessed with the notion on going to see bruce springsteen. "

After limiting it to 18 letters it would be:
"On the 26th may"

In this case 18 letters (spaces also) is "On the 26th may 20", but the last word is cut so "2003" doesn't make it to the final string.

Limiting counts of letters is easy, but how to do it so the last word isn't cut in the middle??
Someone?

Happy Xmas!

LordShryku

Well, there's [man]str_word_count[/man], but it doesn't handle numers so well. You'd probably want to explode on " ", then loop through adding to a counter the [man]strlen[/man] of the current element until you hit your max.

TheBeginner

Well I have been thinking and the best way maybe to solve it is to

first subtract 18 letters
check if the 19:th is a blank (" ")
if it is do nothing
if not then use explode at the last " " of the 18 letters

Does it seems right to you?

LordShryku

I see. Okay, so you want to cut it off hard at 18, and if the last word doesn't finish, drop it too. Sounds like you're on the right track, but no need to explode

$new = substr($txt,0,18);
if(substr($txt,18,1) == " ") {
   echo $new;
}
else {
   echo substr($new,0,strrpos($new," "));
}

TheBeginner

Well, that was just great!

Thanks for the help. I would use explode, but php is new for me and all its functions.

Many thanks!

Final code:

$txt='This is your text!';
$N=8; //N=number of maximum characters in desired final string
$new = substr($txt,0,$N);
if(substr($txt,($N),1) != " ")
{
$new = substr($new,0,strrpos($new," "));
}
echo $new;

LordShryku

The lil substr/strrpos(or strpos) comes has come in handy on many occasions 🙂