Showing a certain amount of text

[Anon]

Can some please tell me how I can show a certain amount of text from a databse result.

For example, the actual text reads "The house was on fire for almost 20 hours" on the database, but I want it to read this on a php page " The house was on fire..."

Is there a code in PHP that can do this?

[phlow]

look for the string-functions in the php manual.
first you need to find a function to find a function that finds the end of a word after a certain amout of characters so that the extract doesn't cut a word in the middle. then you select this part of the text and add "..." before you print it out.

[Anon]

I've always used a method where I explode the string on the space then iterate the number of words I want. This has the benefit of being configurable on the fly, too.

Plus, if the word count that you choose to display is higher than the length of the article/string, then you could end up displaying an "Read More" link when one isn't necessarily needed.

Consider...

$str="This is a piece of text that I want to break apart and only show part of this text with a more link.";
$wordLimit=10;
$strEx=explode(" ",$str);
if(count($strEx>$wordLimit))
{
for($x=0;$x<$wordLimit;$x++)
{
echo $strEx[$x]." ";
}
echo "...\n";
echo '<a href="page.php?page=XXXX" >Read More...</a>';
}
else
{
echo $str;
}