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

Ok so I got another version of this based on the above answers but taking more things in account(utf-8, \n and   ; ), also a line stripping the wordpress shortcodes commented if used with wp.

function neatest_trim($content, $chars) 
  if (strlen($content) > $chars) 
  {
    $content = str_replace(' ', ' ', $content);
    $content = str_replace("\n", '', $content);
    // use with wordpress    
    //$content = strip_tags(strip_shortcodes(trim($content)));
    $content = strip_tags(trim($content));
    $content = preg_replace('/\s+?(\S+)?$/', '', mb_substr($content, 0, $chars));

    $content = trim($content) . '...';
    return $content;
  }