Shorten a text string in PHP

Question

Is there a way to trim a text string in PHP so it has a certain number of characters? For instance, if I had the string:

$string = \"this is a string\";

Answer 1

function trimtext($text, $start, $len)
{
    return substr($text, $start, $len);
}

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You can call the function like this:

$string = trimtext("this is a string", 0, 10);

Would return:

This is a