How to shorten a string without slicing through a word while keeping within a character limit in PHP [duplicate]

Answer 1

How about using a regular expression to find all of the whitespace, then truncate at the the match that is largest but still less than or equal to your desired length.

function truncate($text, $length) {
    $length = abs((int)$length);

    $count = preg_match_all("(\s+)", $text, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);

    while ($count > 0) {
       if ($matches[$count][0] <= $length) {
          $length = $matches[$count][0];
          break;
       }    
       $count = $count - 1;
    }

    return substr($text, 0, $length)
}