substr html tags

[DeathfireD]

I have allot of data that I want to cut to only 200 or so characters long and save to mysql. So I've done it using $blabla = substr($test,0,300)."..."; and save it successfully to mysql.

However my problem is that the text also has html tags that I wish to keep and not strip out. When I use the substr to cut the text, sometimes it will land on an html tag (for example <img src="as..) and cut it off halfway. Then when I view my output page to see the saved text in mysql, the output page messes up because of these incomplete html tags that where cut. Is there anyway to make an exception so if the substr lands on an html tag it will add the rest of it and then stop. So for example if it lands on <a href="http://asd.com"> it will keep going and save up to the </a>.

Any ideas?

[NogDog]

I suppose there's probably a way, but it's going to be non-trivial. For example, what if your cut-off point was where the following text changes color?

<div>
<h2>Heading</h2>
<ul id='nav'>
<li><a href='one.php'>Item One</a></li>
<li><a hr[color=red]ef='two.php'>Item Two</a></li>
<li><a href='three.php'>Item Three</li>
</ul>
</div>[/color]

If the cut-off code is not smart enough to go all the way to the closing </div> tag, then you are going to end up with broken HTML. You would therefore somehow have to keep track of what tags are open, and determine at what point in the string they are all closed. This might be do-able via a preg_replace function using recursion in the regex, but that sort of thing tends to make my brain explode. 😉

[DeathfireD]

well divs and other tags are not so much the problem since I use strip_tags(substr($somevariable,0,400)."...", '<a><b><i><strong>'); to only allow tags a, b, i, and strong. So these are the tags I need to worry about getting cut off. I'm not exactly sure how I would use preg_replace in this situation. Any ideas now that you know what tags I support? 🙂