How to reduce the length of very long strings?

Question

I have some text which occasionally contains very long strings of characters, which is breaking my CSS.

This is an example:

http://iapps.smartphonesoft.com/php/software_details.php?id=358281487

whereas this one is fine

http://iapps.smartphonesoft.com/php/software_details.php?id=380894729

Is it possible to strip the very long line of *s in the above example down to a manageable length?

The extra complication is that is not always *s that cause the issue, ie in this example it is the = string which is causing the issue.

http://iapps.smartphonesoft.com/php/software_details.php?id=371255483

So I want to write PHP which carries out the function if a single 'word' within $description is >= 30 chars long, shrink it down to 30 chars.

All the text is kept within the variable $description

regards,

Greg

Answer 1

you can explode string to array of words, then check strlen of every word not > 30

like

$words = explode(" ", $string);
foreach($words as $k=>$word){
   if(strlen($word) >= 30)
      $words[$k] = substr($word,0,30) ;
}

after that return array to one string with

join(' ' ,$words);

Answer 2

By default, browsers won't wrap an extremely long word. You can override this behavior and always wrap, even if you need to break a word, with CSS (no PHP required!)

The property is word-wrap: break-word; and works in all browsers.