How can I truncate a string in PHP?

Question

How can I truncate a string after 20 words in PHP?

Answer 1

Split the string (into an array) by <space>, and then take the first 20 elements of that array.

Answer 2

This looks pretty good to me:

A common problem when creating dynamic web pages (where content is sourced from a database, content management system or external source such as an RSS feed) is that the input text can be too long and cause the page layout to 'break'.

One solution is to truncate the text so that it fits on the page. This sounds simple, but often the results aren't as expected due to words and sentences being cut off at inappropriate points.

Answer 3

Try regex.

You need something that would match 20 words (or 20 word boundaries).

So (my regex is terrible so correct me if this isn't accurate):

/(\w+\b){20}/

And here are some examples of regex in php.

Answer 4

function limit_text($text, $limit) {
      if (strlen($text) > $limit) {
          $words = str_word_count($text, 2);
          $pos = array_keys($words);
          $text = substr($text, 0, $pos[$limit]) . '...';
      }
      return $text;
    }

echo limit_text('Hello here is a long sentence blah blah blah blah blah hahahaha haha haaaaaa', 5);

Outputs:

Hello here is a long ...

Answer 5

Something like this could probably do the trick:

<?php 
$words = implode(' ', array_slice(split($input, ' ', 21), 0, 20));

Answer 6

use explode() .

Example from the docs.

// Example 1
$pizza  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4 piece5 piece6";
$pieces = explode(" ", $pizza);
echo $pieces[0]; // piece1
echo $pieces[1]; // piece2

note that explode has a limit function. So you could do something like

$message = implode(" ", explode(" ", $long_message, 20));

Answer 7

use PHP tokenizer function strtok() in a loop.

$token = strtok($string, " "); // we assume that words are separated by sapce or tab
$i = 0;
$first20Words = '';
while ($token !== false && $i < 20) {
    $first20Words .= $token;
    $token = strtok(" ");
    $i++;
}
echo $first20Words;

Answer 8

change the "2" to 19 to get first 20 words. This one gets the first 3 words:

function first3words($s) {
    return preg_replace('/((\w+\W*){2}(\w+))(.*)/', '${1}', $s); 
}

var_dump(first3words("hello yes, world wah ha ha"));  # => "hello yes, world"
var_dump(first3words("hello yes,world wah ha ha"));   # => "hello yes,world"
var_dump(first3words("hello yes world wah ha ha"));   # => "hello yes world"
var_dump(first3words("hello yes world"));  # => "hello yes world"
var_dump(first3words("hello yes world.")); # => "hello yes world"
var_dump(first3words("hello yes"));  # => "hello yes"
var_dump(first3words("hello"));  # => "hello"
var_dump(first3words("a")); # => "a"
var_dump(first3words(""));  # => ""

Answer 9

what about

chunk_split($str,20);

Entry in the PHP Manual