Restricting Character and until end of last word

tbobker

What i want to achieve is a summary list of articles that takes the first 200 characters with a link at the end saying "More"

Resticting the amount of characters is fine, but i am not sure how i can then allow an extra x amount of characters so that it does not cut off in the middle of a word?

If this makes sense.

Basically, i figured i need to find the next space character after the amount of chars has been reached.

I dont know where to start?

tbobker

has anyone got any ideas? need to find the space character after the restricted character length?

laserlight

One relatively inefficient option would be to make use of [man]wordwrap/man with [man]strpos/man and [man]substr/man.

A more efficient option would be to use [man]ctype_space/man to search for the first whitespace character from index 200 onwards. Once you found it, you can use substr() appropriately.

NogDog

function truncate($text, $length, $link)
{
   if(strlen($text) > $length)
   {
      $text = preg_replace('/^(.{0,'.(int)$length.'})\b.*$/s', "$1", $text);
      $text = trim($text) . "...[<a href='$link'>more</a>]";
   }
   return $text;
}

laserlight

Curiously, NogDog's suggestion does not work when the specified length is less than the length of the first word. It cuts out the first word in that case, whereas one would expect the first word to be included. The good part is that if your specified length is 200, I daresay that this edge case will not come into play.

NogDog

laserlight wrote:
Curiously, NogDog's suggestion does not work when the specified length is less than the length of the first word. It cuts out the first word in that case, whereas one would expect the first word to be included. The good part is that if your specified length is 200, I daresay that this edge case will not come into play.

Yeah, if your content begins with a 201-character word with no hyphens or apostrophes, it's probably time to review your content. 😉