Ending a string after so many words, check it out :-D

[TimTimTimma]

There seemed to be a deal of users interested in ending strings after so many WORDS, and not CHARCTERS, so i decided to wipe up this script :-)

<?php

// String we will be using to break up into literal words

$string = "Mommie, wow! I'm a big kid now!";

// Maximum amount of words 

$max = 5;

// lets trim the beggining and end of the string to make sure
// there are no spaces that will create 'empty' words in the 
// next step

$string = trim($string);

// lets make words out of this string!

$word = explode(" ", $string);

//now to count how many wods we have (7)

$total_words = count($word);

// now to see if there are to many, and if there are display
// only up to the maximum allowed

if($total_words > $max){
	for($i = 0; $i <= $max; $i++){
		if($i == $max){
			echo $word[$max]."...."; 

		// this is the cut off point, the rest 
		// of the string is replaced with 
		// trailing periods "...."
	}else{
		echo $word[$i]." ";

		// as long as the variable $i is not
		// equal to the maximum words allowed
		// each word will trail with a space
		// up until th max limit is reached
	}
}
}else{
	echo $string;

// the string does not contain more words than the
// maximum allowed, so display the entire string
}
?>

Fairly simple, fast, and straight to the point, I think its pretty good, what do you think?

[thorpe]

nice functional piece of code. just to clean this up a little, why not put it in a function?

function limitwords($string,$max,$trail='')
	{
		$max--;
		$tmp = '';
		$string = trim($string);
		$word = explode(" ", $string);
		$total_words = count($word);
		if ($total_words > $max) {
			for ($i = 0; $i <= $max; $i++) {
				if ($i == $max) {
					$tmp .= $word[$max].$trail; 
				} else {
					$tmp .= $word[$i]." ";
				}
			}
		} else {
			$tmp = $string;
		}
		return $tmp;
	}

ive also fixed an error where it seems you forgot that array indexes start at 0 (notice the $max--😉, i also thought it would be a good idea to have the trail as an argument. this way, you could easily put a link or something in there. eg;

echo limitwords('here is a small snippet of an article',4,'<a href="more.php?id=2">read more</a>');

[TimTimTimma]

thorpe wrote:

nice functional piece of code. just to clean this up a little, why not put it in a function?

function limitwords($string,$max,$trail='')
	{
		$max--;
		$tmp = '';
		$string = trim($string);
		$word = explode(" ", $string);
		$total_words = count($word);
		if ($total_words > $max) {
			for ($i = 0; $i <= $max; $i++) {
				if ($i == $max) {
					$tmp .= $word[$max].$trail; 
				} else {
					$tmp .= $word[$i]." ";
				}
			}
		} else {
			$tmp = $string;
		}
		return $tmp;
	}

ive also fixed an error where it seems you forgot that array indexes start at 0 (notice the $max--😉, i also thought it would be a good idea to have the trail as an argument. this way, you could easily put a link or something in there. eg;

echo limitwords('here is a small snippet of an article',4,'<a href="more.php?id=2">read more</a>');

nope I was aware, thats why $i starts at 0 instead of 1 in the for loop

P.S. I like your modification :-)

[Weedpacket]

Have you seen [man]explode[/man]'s limit parameter?