I like the truncate function below...however, I found a few issues. Particularly if you have content that may have any kind of punctuation in it (?, !, ?!?, --, ..., .., ;, etc.)
The older function would end up looking like "blah blah?..." or "blah blah,..." which doesn't look so nice to me...
Here's my fix. It removes all trailing punctuation (that you include in the $punctuation string below) and then adds an ellipse. So even if it has an ellipse with 3 dots, 2 dots, 4 dots, it'll be removed, then re-added.
<?php
function truncate($text,$numb,$etc = "...") {
$text = html_entity_decode($text, ENT_QUOTES);
if (strlen($text) > $numb) {
$text = substr($text, 0, $numb);
$text = substr($text,0,strrpos($text," "));
$punctuation = ".!?:;,-"; $text = (strspn(strrev($text), $punctuation)!=0)
?
substr($text, 0, -strspn(strrev($text), $punctuation))
:
$text;
$text = $text.$etc;
}
$text = htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES);
return $text;
}
?>
I also needed a sort of "middle" truncate. The above function truncates around the end, but if you want to truncate around the middle (ie "Hello this is a long string." --> "Hello this ... long string.") you can use this (requires the truncate function):
<?php
function mtruncate($text, $numb, $etc = " ... ") {
$first_part = truncate(truncate($text, strlen($text)/2, ""), $numb/2, "");
$second_part = truncate(strrev(truncate(strrev($text), strlen($text)/2, "")), $numb/2, "");
return $first_part.$etc.$second_part;
}
?>
