PHP - get first two sentences of a text?

Question

My variable $content contains my text. I want to create an excerpt from $content and display the first sentence and if the sentence is shorter than 15

Answer 1

Here's a function modified from another I found online; it strips out any HTML, and cleans up some funky MS characters first; it then adds in an optional ellipsis character to the content to show that it's been shortened. It correctly splits at a word, so you won't have seemingly random characters;

/**
 * Function to ellipse-ify text to a specific length
 *
 * @param string $text   The text to be ellipsified
 * @param int    $max    The maximum number of characters (to the word) that should be allowed
 * @param string $append The text to append to $text
 * @return string The shortened text
 * @author Brenley Dueck
 * @link   http://www.brenelz.com/blog/2008/12/14/creating-an-ellipsis-in-php/
 */
function ellipsis($text, $max=100, $append='…') {
    if (strlen($text) <= $max) return $text;

    $replacements = array(
        '|

|' => ' ',
        '| |' => ' ',
        '|’|' => '\'',
        '|‘|' => '\'',
        '|“|' => '"',
        '|”|' => '"',
    );

    $patterns = array_keys($replacements);
    $replacements = array_values($replacements);


    $text = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $text); // convert double newlines to spaces
    $text = strip_tags($text); // remove any html.  we *only* want text
    $out = substr($text, 0, $max);
    if (strpos($text, ' ') === false) return $out.$append;
    return preg_replace('/(\W)&(\W)/', '$1&$2', (preg_replace('/\W+$/', ' ', preg_replace('/\w+$/', '', $out)))) . $append;
}

Input:

The latest grocery news is that the Kroger Co. is testing a new self-checkout technology. My question is: What’s in it for me?

Kroger said the system, from Fujitsu,

Output:

The latest grocery news is that the Kroger Co. is testing a new self-checkout technology. My question is: What's in it for me? Kroger said the …