cut text after (x) amount of characters

Question

This is in wordpress (not sure that makes a difference)

This bit of php outputs the post title

Answer 1

After you check the string length with strlen use substr

$string = "This is a large text for demonstrations purposes";
if(strlen($string) > 20) $string = substr($string, 0, 20).'...';
echo $string;

Outputs

"This is a large text..."