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

Here you go:

function neat_trim($str, $n, $delim='…') {
   $len = strlen($str);
   if ($len > $n) {
       preg_match('/(.{' . $n . '}.*?)\b/', $str, $matches);
       return rtrim($matches[1]) . $delim;
   }
   else {
       return $str;
   }
}