[RESOLVED] Limit characters in an echo "";

Edwin_Okli

Well basically I don't want my page to become cluttered with unnecessary text. I think maybe 30 words limit will do with ellipses "...".

I want this to effect the variables "$row['descr']" and "$row['cont']". Any help?

Thanks.

bradgrafelman

Either use [man]substr/man or search the board for "limit number of words" if you'd rather not chop off the middle of a word.

halojoy

Limit to number of charaters in the string is much easier coding.
Now, my guess is one 'word' is at average 4-5 chars long.
So, limit the string to 150 chars would mostly give like 30 words.

This is my testscript while I was working at this your case

<?php

$text = 'The snippet works. It does return a string based on which column is assigned into $mess. What I have in mind is to replace the content of $mess into a string that contains the keyword matches in each column of the database. Like a footprint should I say, a trace of its process.';
echo strlen($text);
echo '<br>';

// my oneliner
$str = substr($text,0,strrpos(substr($text,0,150),' ')).'&hellip;';
echo $text;
echo '<br>';
echo $str;

?>

This is my chopstring() function to use

<?php

function chopstring($text, $length='150'){
    if(strlen($text) <= $length)
        return $text;
    $str = substr($text, 0, $length);
    $len = strrpos($str, ' ');
    return substr($str, 0, $len).'&hellip;';
}


// Example
$text = 'The snippet works. It does return a string based on which column is assigned into $mess. What I have in mind is to replace the content of $mess into a string that contains the keyword matches in each column of the database. Like a footprint should I say, a trace of its process.';

echo chopstring( $text, 100 ); // to 100 characters
echo '<br>';
echo chopstring( $text ); // to default 150 characters
echo '<br>';
echo chopstring( $text, 200 ); // to 200 characters

?>