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

$shorttext = preg_replace('/^([\s\S]{1,200})[\s]+?[\s\S]+/', '$1', $fulltext);

Description:

• ^ - start from beginning of string
• ([\s\S]{1,200}) - get from 1 to 200 of any character
• [\s]+? - not include spaces at the end of short text so we can avoid word ... instead of word...
• [\s\S]+ - match all other content

Tests:

1. regex101.com let's add to or few other r
2. regex101.com orrrr exactly 200 characters.
3. regex101.com after fifth r orrrrr excluded.

Enjoy.