Shorten String in PHP (full words only)

Question

I have asked a similar question here before, but I need to know if this little tweak is possible. I want to shorten a string to 100 characters and use $small = substr($big, 0, 100); to do so. However, this just takes the first 100 characters and doesn't care whether it breaks up a word or not.

Is there any way to take up to the first 100 characters of a string but make sure you don't break a word?

Example:

$big = "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only full words that is no more than 100 characters!"

$small = some_function($big);

$small = "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only"

Is there a way to do this using PHP?

Answer 1

Yes, there is. This is a function I borrowed from a user on a different forums a a few years back, so I can't take credit for it.

//truncate a string only at a whitespace (by nogdog)
function truncate($text, $length) {
   $length = abs((int)$length);
   if(strlen($text) > $length) {
      $text = preg_replace("/^(.{1,$length})(\s.*|$)/s", '\\1...', $text);
   }
   return($text);
}

Note that it automatically adds ellipses, if you don't want that just use '\\1' as the second parameter for the preg_replace call.

Answer 2

If you define words as "sequences of characters delimited by space"... Use strrpos() to find the last space in the string, shorten to that position, trim the result.

Answer 3

Sure. The easiest is probably to write a wrapper around preg_match:

function limitString($string, $limit = 100) {
    // Return early if the string is already shorter than the limit
    if(strlen($string) < $limit) {return $string;}

    $regex = "/(.{1,$limit})\b/";
    preg_match($regex, $string, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}

EDIT : Updated to not ALWAYS include a space as the last character in the string

Answer 4

list($short) = explode("\n",wordwrap($string,100));

Answer 5

This works fine for me, I use it in my script

<?PHP
$big = "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only full words that is no more than 100 characters!";
$small = some_function($big);
echo $small;

function some_function($string){
     $string = substr($string,0,100);
     $string = substr($string,0,strrpos($string," "));
     return $string;
}
?>

good luck

Answer 6

wordwrap formats string according to limit, seprates them with \n so we have lines smaller than 50, ords are not seprated explodes seprates string according to \n so we have array corresponding to lines list gathers first element.

list($short) = explode("\n",wordwrap($ali ,50));

please rep Evert, since I cant comment or rep.

here is sample run

php >  $ali = "ali veli krbin yz doksan esikesiksld sjkas laksjald lksjd asldkjadlkajsdlakjlksjdlkaj aslkdj alkdjs akdljsalkdj ";
php > list($short) = explode("\n",wordwrap($ali ,50));
php > var_dump($short);
string(42) "ali veli krbin yz doksan esikesiksld sjkas"
php > $ali ='';
php > list($short) = explode("\n",wordwrap($ali ,50));
php > var_dump($short);
string(0) ""