Question

Are there any way in magento to split a string that is too long?  Specifically i want product description and in my custom module so i can have a nice javascript ‘read more’ dropdown and keep string lengths tidy

I am possible to do the javascript by myself ok but need help splitting the string in to 2 parts with magento

Answer 1

Ok, first of all Magento does provide a method to do this via its core string helpers’ truncate method – Mage_Core_Helper_String it has a couple of nice features but there is absolutely no reason that you cannot create a basic version of this in plain old php with very little effort using substr. I will show examples of both methods below…

Using php substr

$length = 10;  // this is wehere the string will be split
$string = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit";

$primaryString = substr($string, 0, $length);
$remainder     = substr($string, $length);

echo $primaryString; // Will output 'Lorem ipsu'
echo $remainder;     // Will output 'm dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit'

Using the Magento string helper

As mentioned, this helper provides some nice features above the previous example: namely etc string and option to break words or not. I will leave it up to you to explore that method and its options, but as a basic example:

$length = 10; 
$string = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit";

$remainder     = '';
$primaryString = Mage::helper('core/string')->truncate($string, $length, '...', $remainder);

echo $primaryString; // Will output 'Lorem i...'
echo $remainder;     // Will output 'psum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit'