How to get first x chars from a string, without cutting off the last word?

Question

I have the following string in a variable.

Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it.

I want to fetch first 28 characte

Answer 1

I would use a string tokenizer to split the string into words much like this:

$string = "Stack Overflow is as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it.";
$tokenized_string = strtok($string, " ");

Then you can pull out the individual words any way you want.

---

Edit: Greg has a much better and more elegant way of doing what you want. I would go with his wordwrap() solution.