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 find this works:

function abbreviate_string_to_whole_word($string,$max_length,$buffer) {

if (strlen($string)>$max_length) {
    $string_cropped=substr($string,0,$max_length-$buffer);
    $last_space=strrpos($string_cropped, " ");
    if ($last_space>0) {
        $string_cropped=substr($string_cropped,0,$last_space);
    }
    $abbreviated_string=$string_cropped." ...";
}
else {
    $abbreviated_string=$string;
}

return $abbreviated_string;

}

The buffer allows you to adjust the length of the returned string.