How to get first x chars from a string, without cutting off the last word?

Question

I have the following string in a variable.

Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it.

I want to fetch first 28 characte

Answer 1

From AlfaSky:

function addEllipsis($string, $length, $end='…')
{
    if (strlen($string) > $length)
    {
        $length -= strlen($end);
        $string  = substr($string, 0, $length);
        $string .= $end;
    }

    return $string;
}

An alternate, more featureful implementation from Elliott Brueggeman's blog:

/**
 * trims text to a space then adds ellipses if desired
 * @param string $input text to trim
 * @param int $length in characters to trim to
 * @param bool $ellipses if ellipses (...) are to be added
 * @param bool $strip_html if html tags are to be stripped
 * @return string 
 */
function trim_text($input, $length, $ellipses = true, $strip_html = true) {
    //strip tags, if desired
    if ($strip_html) {
        $input = strip_tags($input);
    }

    //no need to trim, already shorter than trim length
    if (strlen($input) <= $length) {
        return $input;
    }

    //find last space within length
    $last_space = strrpos(substr($input, 0, $length), ' ');
    $trimmed_text = substr($input, 0, $last_space);

    //add ellipses (...)
    if ($ellipses) {
        $trimmed_text .= '...';
    }

    return $trimmed_text;
}

(Google search: "php trim ellipses")

Answer 2

you can use wordwrap.

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

-

function firstNChars($str, $n) {
  return array_shift(explode("\n", wordwrap($str, $n)));
}

echo firstNChars("bla blah long string", 25) . "...";

disclaimer: didn't test it.

additionally, if your string contains \ns, it might get broken earlier.

Answer 3

why not try exploding it and getting the first 4 elements of the array?

Answer 4

Here's one way you could do it:

$str = "Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it.";

$strMax = 28;
$strTrim = ((strlen($str) < $strMax-3) ? $str : substr($str, 0, $strMax-3)."...");

//or this way to trim to full words
$strFull = ((strlen($str) < $strMax-3) ? $str : strrpos(substr($str, 0, $strMax-3),' ')."...");

Answer 5

You can use the wordwrap() function, then explode on newline and take the first part:

$str = wordwrap($str, 28);
$str = explode("\n", $str);
$str = $str[0] . '...';

Answer 6

I would use a string tokenizer to split the string into words much like this:

$string = "Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it.";
$tokenized_string = strtok($string, " ");

Then you can pull out the individual words any way you want.

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Edit: Greg has a much better and more elegant way of doing what you want. I would go with his wordwrap() solution.