Question

How do I only get the first 10 words from a string?

Answer 1

implode(' ', array_slice(explode(' ', $sentence), 0, 10));

To add support for other word breaks like commas and dashes, preg_match gives a quick way and doesn’t require splitting the string:

function get_words($sentence, $count = 10) {
  preg_match("/(?:\w+(?:\W+|$)){0,$count}/", $sentence, $matches);
  return $matches[0];
}

As Pebbl mentions, PHP doesn’t handle UTF-8 or Unicode all that well, so if that is a concern then you can replace \w for [^\s,\.;\?\!] and \W for [\s,\.;\?\!].