Strlen for non english language

Question

Hello,

i want to display short description of articles on home page. Descriptions are a mix of Thai and English language.

I am using this function for strlen

mb_strlen($str, 'UTF-8');

but this is not acurate as some descriptions end up in just one line and some goes upto 3 lines and I want to show descriptions of two lines.

If strlen is bigger than 155 i do

$descr = mb_strlen($descr, 'UTF-8') > 155 ? substr($descr, 0, 152) . '...' : $descr;

Thank You.

Answer 1

Glyphs, the graphical representations of characters, have different widths in different fonts. Just compare the m with i:

mmmmmmmmmm
iiiiiiiiii

Both characters are repeated ten times. But the glyph of the m is much broader than the glyph of the i.

So you cannot conclude the width of its graphical representation from the number of characters (except for monospaced fonts).

Answer 2

substr is unsafe to use on utf-8 data. Use mb_substr

Answer 3

if you want prevent entries with 3 ore more lines firstly split string by '\n' and then make triming with mb_substr