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

Here is my function based on @Cd-MaN's approach.

function shorten($string, $width) {
  if(strlen($string) > $width) {
    $string = wordwrap($string, $width);
    $string = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, "\n"));
  }

  return $string;
}