Shorten a text string in PHP

Question

Is there a way to trim a text string in PHP so it has a certain number of characters? For instance, if I had the string:

$string = \"this is a string\";

Answer 1

If you want an abstract for the first 10 words (you can use html in $text, before script there is strip_tags) use this code:

preg_match('/^([^.!?\s]*[\.!?\s]+){0,10}/', strip_tags($text), $abstract);
echo $abstract[0];

Answer 2

My function has some length to it, but I like to use it. I convert the string int to a Array.

function truncate($text, $limit){
    //Set Up
    $array = [];
    $count = -1;
    //Turning String into an Array
    $split_text = explode(" ", $text);
    //Loop for the length of words you want
    while($count < $limit - 1){
      $count++;
      $array[] = $split_text[$count];
    }
    //Converting Array back into a String
    $text = implode(" ", $array);

    return $text." ...";

  }

Or if the text is coming from an editor and you want to strip out the HTML tags.

function truncate($text, $limit){
    //Set Up
    $array = [];
    $count = -1;
    $text = filter_var($text, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

    //Turning String into an Array
    $split_text = preg_split('/\s+/', $text);
    //Loop for the length of words you want
    while($count < $limit){
      $count++;
      $array[] = $split_text[$count];
    }

    //Converting Array back into a String
    $text = implode(" ", $array);

    return $text." ...";

  }

Answer 3

substr let's you take a portion of string consisting of exactly as much characters as you need.

Answer 4

If you want to get a string with a certain number of characters you can use substr, i.e.

$newtext = substr($string,0,$length); 

where $length is the given length of the new string.

Answer 5

if (strlen($yourString) > 15) // if you want...
{
    $maxLength = 14;
    $yourString = substr($yourString, 0, $maxLength);
}

will do the job.

Take a look here.

Answer 6

You can use this

substr()

function to get substring