Question

I have the following function to truncate text:

 /**
     * Removes HTML tags, crops to 255 symbols
     *
     * @param string $unformatted
     */
    public function formatShortDescr($unformatted) {
        if(strlen($unformatted)<1) return;

        $long_text = strip_tags(trim($unformatted));
        $max_length = 255;

        if(strlen($long_text) > $max_length){
            $short_text = (substr($long_text,0,$max_length));
        } else {
            $short_text = $long_text;
        }
        return $short_text;
    }

E.g this:
<p>Victory har utvecklats f&ouml;r att passa den &auml;gare som beh&ouml;ver en kompakt, ........ get converted into: Victory har utvecklats för att passa den &a

How can I set it to never cut a string half way through break the html entities?

Answer 1

should be easy to first convert the entities to normal chars, then use mb_strlen (becaus of 2-byte characters, UTF8) to check the length and mb_substring to truncate and THEN convert entities back…

    $long_text = strip_tags(trim($unformatted));
    $long_text = html_entity_decode($long_text);

    $long_text = mb_strlen($long_text) > $max_length ? mb_substr($long_text, 0, $max_length) : $long_text;

    return htmlentities($long_text);