Question

Currently, the method I use to truncate strings is: echo substr($message, 0, 30)."..";

How do I show the dots only in the case that the string has been truncated?

Answer 1

Just check the length to see if it’s more than 30 characters or not:

if (strlen($message) > 30)
{
    echo substr($message, 0, 30)."..";
}
else
{
    echo $message;
}

The typographic nitpick in me has this to add: the correct character to use is the ellipsis which comprises this character …, three dots ..., or its HTML entity ….