How to Truncate a string in PHP to the word closest to a certain number of characters?

Question

I have a code snippet written in PHP that pulls a block of text from a database and sends it out to a widget on a webpage. The original block of text can be a lengthy artic

Answer 1

This will return the first 200 characters of words:

preg_replace('/\s+?(\S+)?$/', '', substr($string, 0, 201));