substr problem

[Adamthenewbie]

I have a latest news section that lists the latest 10 news entries. I want to show a brief description of each news content then when the users clicks a Read More link it will show the entire news article.

The way I have it set up is the News content is in a varialbe ($content). This variable contains simple HTML, like bold, italics, underline, etc...

Right now I am using this code to display a brief description of the news

if (strlen($content) > 260) {
    $content = trim(substr($content, 0, 260))."...";
}

This works great but I run into a problem when the 260th character is in the middle of a html tag. Casing something like this

News blah blah blah <b...

This messes up the rest of the code on the page since the tag is not closed. Is there a way I can check if the 260th character is a tag and fix this problem?

[Installer]

Try this:

if (strlen($content) > 260) { 
    $content = trim(substr($content, 0, 260));
    $open_ct = substr_count($content, '<');
    $close_ct = substr_count($content, '>');
    if ($open_ct != $close_ct) {
        $content = str_replace(strrchr($content, '<'), '...', $content);
    } else {
        $content .= '...';
    }
}