PHP: Truncate text at word boundaries

Question

Does anybody have the exact name of the function Drupal uses to turn the following string:

"Hello, how are you. Some more text."

into

"Hello, how..."

I.e. The function that's used to cut off a sentence after x words, and then add an elipsis. Alternatively, if anybody has a php snippet that does this, that would be great too!

Answer 1

I think you're looking for truncation that respects word-boundaries. I don't know how Drupal does it, but there's decent code here.

Answer 2

function getFirstWords($string, $words = 1)
{
    $string = explode(' ', $string);

    if (count($string) > $words)
    {
     return implode(' ', array_slice($string, 0, $words)) . '...';
    }

    return implode(' ', $string);
}

echo getFirstWords('Hello, how are you. Some more text.', 2); // Hello, how...

Answer 3

It seems to be truncate_utf8() in unicode.inc.

Answer 4

http://api.lullabot.com/views_trim_text This is the function that is used..