Get first 100 characters from string, respecting full words

JoshFinnie_33194 0
Viewed 160839

I have asked a similar question here before, but I need to know if this little tweak is possible. I want to shorten a string to 100 characters and use $small = substr($big, 0, 100); to do so. However, this just takes the first 100 characters and doesn't care whether it breaks up a word or not.

Is there any way to take up to the first 100 characters of a string but make sure you don't break a word?

Example:

$big = "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only full words that is no more than 100 characters!"

$small = some_function($big);

echo $small;

// OUTPUT: "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only"

Is there a way to do this using PHP?

php string
18 Answers

All you need to do is use:

$pos=strpos($content, ' ', 200);
substr($content,0,$pos );
user_5635570

Yes, there is. This is a function I borrowed from a user on a different forums a a few years back, so I can't take credit for it.

//truncate a string only at a whitespace (by nogdog)
function truncate($text, $length) {
   $length = abs((int)$length);
   if(strlen($text) > $length) {
      $text = preg_replace("/^(.{1,$length})(\s.*|$)/s", '\\1...', $text);
   }
   return($text);
}

Note that it automatically adds ellipses, if you don't want that just use '\\1' as the second parameter for the preg_replace call.

user_126050

If you define words as "sequences of characters delimited by space"... Use strrpos() to find the last space in the string, shorten to that position, trim the result.

Tomalak_187710

Sure. The easiest is probably to write a wrapper around preg_match:

function limitString($string, $limit = 100) {
    // Return early if the string is already shorter than the limit
    if(strlen($string) < $limit) {return $string;}

    $regex = "/(.{1,$limit})\b/";
    preg_match($regex, $string, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}

EDIT : Updated to not ALWAYS include a space as the last character in the string

user_1018110

This works fine for me, I use it in my script

<?PHP
$big = "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only full words that is no more than 100 characters!";
$small = some_function($big);
echo $small;

function some_function($string){
     $string = substr($string,0,100);
     $string = substr($string,0,strrpos($string," "));
     return $string;
}
?>

good luck

ahmed_4597370

Another a simpler way I do.

function limit_words($string, $word_limit = 10)
{
    $words = explode(" ", $string);
    if (count($words) > $word_limit) {
        return implode(" ", array_splice($words, 0, $word_limit)) . ' ...';
    }
    return implode(" ", array_splice($words, 0, $word_limit));
}
user_2023510
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