Question

I am currently working on a php project where I need to display a string up to a maximum of 100 characters but without splitting the word.

For example if I have the string

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs back

Say the 100th character is in the middle of ‘jumped’.
At the moment I am using substr($mystring, 0, 100)

This will then print

The quick brown fox jum

Instead in this case I would want to print

The quick brown fox

Is this possible to fix

Answer 1

$string = 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs back';
$maxLength = 20;

if (strlen($string) > $maxLength) {
    $stringCut = substr($string, 0, $maxLength);
    $string = substr($stringCut, 0, strrpos($stringCut, ' ')); 
}

echo $string;

// output: The quick brown fox

The key is using strrpos to cut off at a space rather than the middle of a word.

Note: If the source for these strings uses a multibyte charset, e.g., UTF-8, you will want to use the multibyte equivalent functions.