How to Truncate a string in PHP to the word closest to a certain number of characters?

Question

I have a code snippet written in PHP that pulls a block of text from a database and sends it out to a widget on a webpage. The original block of text can be a lengthy artic

Answer 1

The following solution was born when I've noticed a $break parameter of wordwrap function:

string wordwrap ( string $str [, int $width = 75 [, string $break = "\n" [, bool $cut = false ]]] )

Here is the solution:

/**
 * Truncates the given string at the specified length.
 *
 * @param string $str The input string.
 * @param int $width The number of chars at which the string will be truncated.
 * @return string
 */
function truncate($str, $width) {
    return strtok(wordwrap($str, $width, "...\n"), "\n");
}

Example #1.

print truncate("This is very long string with many chars.", 25);

The above example will output:

This is very long string...

Example #2.

print truncate("This is short string.", 25);

The above example will output:

This is short string.