[RESOLVED] showing only X number of characters for certain cells in result

[schwim]

Hi there guys,

I'm trying to create a block to show a random result for a testimonial script I am writing, and I've got the random result working a-ok, but I have a problem:

For both the title and testimonial content, I need to limit the result so if something is way too long, it won't stretch the block to a size that messes up the page.

The title seems straight forward, but the testimonial body will be tougher to do. I allow URL's and simple html like bold, italicize, etc.

How can I:

1) do a simple limitation of the title
&
2) limit the testimonial body, but let the script know that it's not to break html, i.e. either allow the result to continue until it gets to the ending tag, or stops early so it doesn't get a start tag in HTML if the character limitation won't allow it to get to the end tag. Would it be much better just to strip the tags completely?

Here's my current DB call:

	$query = "select * from testimonials WHERE active=1 ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 1";

$result = mysql_query ($query);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc ($result)) {
    /* display testimonials in a simple table */

	$date = $row['date'];
    $author = stripslashes ($row['author']);
    $title = stripslashes ($row['title']);
    $testtext = stripslashes ($row['testtext']);

From that, how would I limit the title to 25 characters, and the testtext to 100?

thanks for your time,
json

[WDPEjoe]

$title = substr(stripslashes($row['title']), 0, 25);
$testtext = substr(stripslashes($row['testtext']), 0, 100)

[schwim]

Hi there, and thanks for the reply.

Actually, through Google, I found the following, which proves to be a little more elegant at taking care of the truncating:

function nicetrim ($s) {
		// limit the length of the given string to $MAX_LENGTH char
		// If it is more, it keeps the first $MAX_LENGTH-3 characters
		// and adds "..."
		// It counts HTML char such as á as 1 char.
		//

	  $MAX_LENGTH = 100;
	  $str_to_count = html_entity_decode($s);
	  if (strlen($str_to_count) <= $MAX_LENGTH) {
	   return $s;
	  }

	  $s2 = substr($str_to_count, 0, $MAX_LENGTH);
	  ## the below will add ... to the end
	  $s2 = substr($str_to_count, 0, $MAX_LENGTH - 3);
	  $s2 .= "... [More]";
	  return htmlentities($s2);
	}


	$testtext = nicetrim($testtext2);

I haven't figured out how to make sure that it completes any html tags, so right now, I'm simply stripping them from the result.

thanks,
json