Question

I am newbie to php, just starting learning it, while working with wordpress.

I want to add html code to a php variable, a anchor tag link actually. First i splitted the text using substr(), and now i want to append a anchor tag at the end of post.

$json['timeline']['date'][$i]['text'] =  substr(strip_tags($post->post_content), 0, 400)+"<a href='#'>Read more..</";

Well, I believe this is not the right way. Can anyone please guide me?

Answer 1

Use . to append strings in PHP. And don’t forget to close that tag:

$json['timeline']['date'][$i]['text'] = substr(strip_tags($post->post_content), 0, 400) . "<a href='#'>Read more..</a>";

Note an exception is echo, which allows you to pass it arguments separated by commas:

echo "one", "two", "three";

This has a marginal time advantage, but don’t do it because of that (to avoid premature optimisation). In fact, use . everywhere in case you end up changing that echo to a return.

And finally, there’s an easier way to add a custom link to an excerpt in WordPress you might want to look at:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_the_Read_More