Shorten text without splitting words or breaking html tags

Question

I am trying to cut off text after 236 chars without cutting words in half and preserving html tags. This is what I am using right now:

$shortdesc = $_helper-         


        

Answer 1

You can take an XML approach and push elements to a string var until the length of the string exceed 236

example code ?

for each node // text or tag
  push to the string var

  if string length > 236
    break

endfor

for parsing HTML in PHP http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/