Question

Edit:

I ended up using CakePHP’s truncate() function. It’s much faster and supports unicode 😀

But the question still remains:

How can I make the function auto-detect full stops (.) and cut it just after that? So basically $length would be semi-ignored. So if the new text would have a incomplete sentence, more words would appended until the sentence finishes (Or removed, depending on the length of the string from the cut-off until next/previous sentence)

Edit 2:
I found out how to detect full stops. I replaced:

 if (!$exact) {
   $spacepos = mb_strrpos($truncate, ' ');

 ...

with

 if (!$exact) {
    $spacepos = mb_strrpos($truncate, '.');
 ...

edit – problem:

When I have tags like img that have dots inside their attributes, the text gets cutoff inside the tag:

 $text = '<p>Abc def abc def abc def abc def. Abc def <img src="test.jpg" /></p><p>abc def abc def abc def abc def.</p>';

 echo htmlentities(truncate($text));

How can I fix that? I’ll open a bounty because the original question was already answered…

Answer 1

This snippet solves what you’re looking for, and lists it’s failures (full stops may not indicate sentence ends, and other punctuation can end sentences).

It will scan characters up to $maxLen and then effectively ‘throw away’ a partial sentence after the last full stop it finds.

In your case, you’d use this function just before you return $new_text.