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

You didn't say the reason for this but think about what you want to achieve. Here is a function for shorten a string word by word with or without adding ellipses at the end:

function limitStrlen($input, $length, $ellipses = true, $strip_html = true) {
    //strip tags, if desired
    if ($strip_html) {
        $input = strip_tags($input);
    }

    //no need to trim, already shorter than trim length
    if (strlen($input) <= $length) {
        return $input;
    }

    //find last space within length
    $last_space = strrpos(substr($input, 0, $length), ' ');
    if($last_space !== false) {
        $trimmed_text = substr($input, 0, $last_space);
    } else {
        $trimmed_text = substr($input, 0, $length);
    }
    //add ellipses (...)
    if ($ellipses) {
        $trimmed_text .= '...';
    }

    return $trimmed_text;
}

Answer 2

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

---

You can call the function like this:

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

Would return:

This is a

Answer 3

substr cuts words in half. Also if word contains UTF8 characters, it misbehaves. So it would be better to use mb_substr:

$string = mb_substr('word word word word', 0, 10, 'utf8').'...';