cutting a sentance but not halving the last word

[minestrone]

Hi,

Im needing some help with cutting a string but not halving the last word. i know to use substring but if it lands in the middle of a word it just gets halved.

i was trying this but it does not seem to work.

function cutTheString( $stringIn , $length ){
	$stringOut = '' ;

// FIRST CUT IT
$stringOut = substr( $stringIn  , 0 , $length ) ;

// NOW TAKE OFF THE LAST WORD
$needle = " ";

//find length of the needle
$needle_len = strlen($needle);

//find postion
$position_num = strpos($stringOut,$needle) + $needle_len;

//cut the string
$result_string = substr("$stringOut",0,$position_num);

return $stringOut ;
}

I hope you can help me,

thanks,

David

[EricC]

I'm not really clear on what you're trying to do, but have you looked at wordwrap as a possibility?

[etully]

This builds an array of all the words, finds the length of the sentence, and then compares the ending position of each word to the mid-point of the sentence and sees which space is closest to the center and splits the sentence there.

<?
function cut_the_string($string) {

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

$length=0;
$i=0;
while ($i < count($x)) { 
	$length += strlen($x[$i]) + 1;
	$y[$i] = $length;
$i++;
}

$middle_pos = strlen($string)/2;

$best_split_distance = strlen($string);
$i=0;
while ($i < count($x)) { 
	$distance_from_middle = abs($middle_pos - $y[$i]);
	if ($distance_from_middle < $best_split_distance) {
		$best_split_distance = $distance_from_middle;
		$best_position = $i;
	}
$i++;
}

$half_sentence = "";
$i=0;
while ($i <= $best_position) {
	$half_sentence .= $x[$i] . " "; 
$i++;
}

return $half_sentence;

}

echo cut_the_string("this is a long sample sentence that needs to be cut in half");

?>

[minestrone]

sorry for not being clear. i will try to give an example.

if i have this string

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

and i try to substr it to 12 chars i get

"The quick br"

but im trying to work out how to cut off the " br" after i do that to give.

"The quick"

Sorry, im not to good with the PHP string functions.

Thanks

[goldbug]

$slice = (substr($input, $length-1, 1) == ' ') ? substr($input, 0, $length-1) : substr($input, 0, strripos(substr($input, 0, $length), ' '));

This isn't perfect, but it'll get you roughly what you want.

[minestrone]

goldbug wrote:

$slice = (substr($input, $length-1, 1) == ' ') ? substr($input, 0, $length-1) : substr($input, 0, strripos(substr($input, 0, $length), ' '));

This isn't perfect, but it'll get you roughly what you want.

Thanks, that the one.

Cheers for all the help

Resolved