PHP - get first two sentences of a text?

Question

My variable $content contains my text. I want to create an excerpt from $content and display the first sentence and if the sentence is shorter than 15

Answer 1

I wrote a function to do something similar to this on one of our websites. I'm sure it could be tweaked to get your exact result out of it.

Basically, you give it a string of text and the amount of words you want to have it trim to. It will then trim to that amount of words. If the last word it finds doesn't end the sentence, it will continue over the amount of words you specified until it reaches the end of the sentence. Hope it helps!

//This function intelligently trims a body of text to a certain
//number of words, but will not break a sentence.
function smart_trim($string, $truncation) {
    $matches = preg_split("/\s+/", $string);
    $count = count($matches);

    if($count > $truncation) {
        //Grab the last word; we need to determine if
        //it is the end of the sentence or not
        $last_word = strip_tags($matches[$truncation-1]);
        $lw_count = strlen($last_word);

        //The last word in our truncation has a sentence ender
        if($last_word[$lw_count-1] == "." || $last_word[$lw_count-1] == "?" || $last_word[$lw_count-1] == "!") {
            for($i=$truncation;$i<$count;$i++) {
                unset($matches[$i]);
            }

        //The last word in our truncation doesn't have a sentence ender, find the next one
        } else {
            //Check each word following the last word until
            //we determine a sentence's ending
            for($i=($truncation);$i<$count;$i++) {
                if($ending_found != TRUE) {
                    $len = strlen(strip_tags($matches[$i]));
                    if($matches[$i][$len-1] == "." || $matches[$i][$len-1] == "?" || $matches[$i][$len-1] == "!") {
                        //Test to see if the next word starts with a capital
                        if($matches[$i+1][0] == strtoupper($matches[$i+1][0])) {
                            $ending_found = TRUE;
                        }
                    }
                } else {
                    unset($matches[$i]);
                }
            }
        }

        //Check to make sure we still have a closing 
 tag at the end
        $body = implode(' ', $matches);
        if(substr($body, -4) != "
") {
            $body = $body."
";
        }

        return $body; 
    } else {
        return $string;
    }
}