limit number of characters without truncating words...

bobosse

Hi guys,

I am trying to display the first ~200 characters of articales from my DB. I figured out how to handle this, but it does truncate words, of course. Would anyone be able to help me out with some coding so I can still limit the number of characters to be displayed to around 200 and no word is cut off?

Thanks a lot!
B.

Shrike

Without resorting to regular expressions:

<?php
$string = "blah blah blah blah";
$newstring_length = 10;
$parts = explode(" ", $string);
$count = 0;
foreach($parts as $part){
	$count += strlen($part);
     ++$count; // add in a count for the whitespace ;p
	$newstring[] = $part;
	if($count > $newstring_length){
		array_pop($newstring);
		break;
	}
}
echo implode(" ", $newstring);
?>

Change $newstring_length to change the character limit. The code will remove the last word which exceeds the character limit.

TheDefender

Alternatively, without resorting to regexp or arrays, you could do this...

$text = "This is a bunch of test text.  I am just fillling space, so I can ensure my value goes over 200.  The way this would work would be if it is over the TextCutoff limit of 200, it truncates the output, and appends a '...' to the end, but if it is less than 200 characters, it just leaves it alone, and outputs it.  You will also notice it cuts off at the end of a word.";
$TextCutoff = 200;
if(strlen($text) > $TextCutoff ) {
$text = substr(trim($text),0,$TextCutoff);
$text = substr($text,0,strlen($text)-strpos(strrev($text)," "));
$text .= "...";
}
echo $text;

bobosse

Sweet! Works like a charm, thx guys!

Shrike

My example was actually slightly b0rked - it spazzed out when putting the string back together - fixed now 😉

drawmack

actually you can do this very easily like this:

<?php
function smart_trim($string,$cutoff,$character) {
    $cutoff = intval($cutoff);
    $retval = substr($string,0,(stripos($string,$character,$cutoff);
    return $retval;
} //end smart_trim
?>

then call it like this:

<?php
$my_string = "This function is so easy to use, I love this function with all my heart";
$print_string = smart_trim($my_string,21,' ');
echo $print_string;
?>

This prints: This function is so easy

sidney

just thought i would add an example of mine to similar to the defenders

$string = "blah blah blah blah"; 
$newstring_length = 10; 
$string_new=(strlen($string)>$newstring_length)?substr($string,0,strpos($string," ",$newstring_length))."...":$string;
echo $string_new;

Shrike

Ah...one of these threads again 😃

So...who's is fastest? And where is Weedpacket? :p

TheDefender

Hey, just said my peace and laying low throughout the rest of this thread...