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 used this before

<?php
    $your_desired_width = 200;
    $string = $var->content;
    if (strlen($string) > $your_desired_width) {
        $string = wordwrap($string, $your_desired_width);
        $string = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, "\n")) . " More...";
    }
    echo $string;
?>

Answer 2

Keep in mind whenever you're splitting by "word" anywhere that some languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not use a space character to split words. Also, a malicious user could simply enter text without any spaces, or using some Unicode look-alike to the standard space character, in which case any solution you use may end up displaying the entire text anyway. A way around this may be to check the string length after splitting it on spaces as normal, then, if the string is still above an abnormal limit - maybe 225 characters in this case - going ahead and splitting it dumbly at that limit.

One more caveat with things like this when it comes to non-ASCII characters; strings containing them may be interpreted by PHP's standard strlen() as being longer than they really are, because a single character may take two or more bytes instead of just one. If you just use the strlen()/substr() functions to split strings, you may split a string in the middle of a character! When in doubt, mb_strlen()/mb_substr() are a little more foolproof.

Answer 3

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)));
}

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

May be this will help someone:

<?php

    $string = "Your line of text";
    $spl = preg_match("/([, \.\d\-''\"\"_()]*\w+[, \.\d\-''\"\"_()]*){50}/", $string, $matches);
    if (isset($matches[0])) {
        $matches[0] .= "...";
        echo "<br />" . $matches[0];
    } else {
        echo "<br />" . $string;
    }

?>

Answer 6

Here you can try this

substr( $str, 0, strpos($str, ' ', 200) );