Trimming a block of text to the nearest word when a certain character limit is reached?

Question

Here is the question: How would your trim a block of text to the nearest word when a certain amount of characters have past. I\'m not trying to limit a certain number words

Answer 1

See the wordwrap function.

I would probably do something like:

function wrap($string) {
  $wstring = explode("\n", wordwrap($string, 27, "\n") );
  return $wstring[0];
}

(If your strings already span across severeal lines, use other char - or pattern - for the split other than "\n")

Answer 2

You can use a little-known modifier to str_word_count to help do this. If you pass the parameter '2', it returns an array of where the word position are.

The following is a simple way of using this, but it might be possible to do it more efficiently:

$str = 'This is a string with a few words in';
$limit = 20;
$ending = $limit;

$words = str_word_count($str, 2);

foreach($words as $pos=>$word) {
    if($pos+strlen($word)<$limit) {
        $ending=$pos+strlen($word);
    }
    else{
        break;
    }
}

echo substr($str, 0, $ending);
// outputs 'this is a string'

Answer 3

// Trim very long text to 120 characters. Add an ellipsis if the text is trimmed.
if(strlen($very_long_text) > 120) {
  $matches = array();
  preg_match("/^(.{1,120})[\s]/i", $very_long_text, $matches);
  $trimmed_text = $matches[0]. '...';
}

Answer 4

I think this should do the trick:

function trimToWord($string, $length, $delimiter = '...')
{
    $string        = str_replace("\n","",$string);
    $string        = str_replace("\r","",$string);
    $string        = strip_tags($string);
    $currentLength = strlen($string);

    if($currentLength > $length)
    {
        preg_match('/(.{' . $length . '}.*?)\b/', $string, $matches);

        return rtrim($matches[1]) . $delimiter;
    }
    else 
    {
        return $string;
    }
}

Answer 5

I wrote a max-string-length function that does just this and is very clean.

Answer 6

Wouldn't it be simpler to concat the strings using a place holder (i.e.: ###PLACEHOLDER###), count the chars of the string minus your place holder, trim it to the right length with substr and then explode by placeholder?