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

Answer 1

This is the function Drupal uses to shorten strings without breaking up words.

//$wordsafe: set to TRUE to not truncate in middle of words
//$dots: set to TRUE to add " ..." to the end of the truncated string
function truncate_utf8($string, $len, $wordsafe = FALSE, $dots = FALSE) {

  if (strlen($string) <= $len) {
    return $string;
  }

  if ($dots) {
    $len -= 4;
  }

  if ($wordsafe) {
    $string = substr($string, 0, $len + 1); // leave one more character
    if ($last_space = strrpos($string, ' ')) { // space exists AND is not on position 0
      $string = substr($string, 0, $last_space);
    }
    else {
      $string = substr($string, 0, $len);
    }
  }
  else {
    $string = substr($string, 0, $len);
  }

  if ($dots) {
    $string .= ' ...';
  }

  return $string;
}

Answer 2

Also strings are unlikely to have tabs, \t, in them so you can do this

$str = word_wrap( $str, 140, "\t" );
$str = explode( "\t", $str );
$str = $str[0];

Answer 3

You may want to look at strtok in the php manual.

What you can do is run a loop and add the token's strlen every time until you exceed your desired length.