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

I know this is old, but...

function _truncate($str, $limit) {
    if(strlen($str) < $limit)
        return $str;
    $uid = uniqid();
    return array_shift(explode($uid, wordwrap($str, $limit, $uid)));
}