Merging two Regular Expressions to Truncate Words in Strings

Question

I\'m trying to come up with the following function that truncates string to whole words (if possible, otherwise it should truncate to chars):

function Text_T         


        

Answer 1

Have you considered using wordwrap? (http://us3.php.net/wordwrap)

Answer 2

Perhaps I can give you a happy morning after a long night of RegExp nightmares:

'~^(.{1,' . intval($limit) . '}(?<=\S)(?=\s)|.{'.intval($limit).'}).*~su'

Boiling it down:

^      # Start of String
(       # begin capture group 1
 .{1,x} # match 1 - x characters
 (?<=\S)# lookbehind, match must end with non-whitespace 
 (?=\s) # lookahead, if the next char is whitespace, match
 |      # otherwise test this:
 .{x}   # got to x chars anyway.
)       # end cap group
.*     # match the rest of the string (since you were using replace)

You could always add the |$ to the end of (?=\s) but since your code was already checking that the string length was longer than the $limit, I didn't feel that case would be neccesary.