I'm trying to truncate some text in PHP and have stumbled across this method (http://theodin.co.uk/blog/development/truncate-text-in-php-the-easy-way.html), which judging by the comments seems like a great easy-to-implement solution. The problem is I don't know how to implement it :S.
Would someone mind pointing me in the direction of what to do to implement this? Any help whatsoever would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
The obvious thing to do is read the documentation.
But to help: substr($str, $start, $end);
$str
is your text
$start
is the character index to begin at. In your case, it is likely 0 which means the very beginning.
$end
is where to truncate at. Suppose you wanted to end at 15 characters, for example. You would write it like this:
<?php
$text = "long text that should be truncated";
echo substr($text, 0, 15);
?>
and you would get this:
long text that
makes sense?
EDIT
The link you gave is a function to find the last white space after chopping text to a desired length so you don't cut off in the middle of a word. However, it is missing one important thing - the desired length to be passed to the function instead of always assuming you want it to be 25 characters. So here's the updated version:
function truncate($text, $chars = 25) {
if (strlen($text) <= $chars) {
return $text;
}
$text = $text." ";
$text = substr($text,0,$chars);
$text = substr($text,0,strrpos($text,' '));
$text = $text."...";
return $text;
}
So in your case you would paste this function into the functions.php file and call it like this in your page:
$post = the_post();
echo truncate($post, 100);
This will chop your post down to the last occurrence of a white space before or equal to 100 characters. Obviously you can pass any number instead of 100. Whatever you need.
$text="abc1234567890";
// truncate to 4 chars
echo substr(str_pad($text,4),0,4);
This avoids the problem of truncating a 4 char string to 10 chars .. (i.e. source is smaller than the required)
$mystring = "this is the text I would like to truncate";
// Pass your variable to the function
$mystring = truncate($mystring);
// Truncated tring printed out;
echo $mystring;
//truncate text function
public function truncate($text) {
//specify number fo characters to shorten by
$chars = 25;
$text = $text." ";
$text = substr($text,0,$chars);
$text = substr($text,0,strrpos($text,' '));
$text = $text."...";
return $text;
}