Question

I need to take an input from a WYSIWYG and break it down to having 33 (or approximate) characters per line. If it hits the limit, I need to insert a new line. Here is what I came up with:

for($i=0; $i < strlen($string); $i++) {
  if ($i % 33 == 0 && $i != 0) {
    $characters[] = '\r';
  }
  $characters[] = $string[$i];
}

$result = implode($characters);

This breaks HTML tags and words. I need to ignore HTML tags, and allow words to finish before breaking a line. What is a better way to achieve this?

Answer 1

What I would do is explode by space, then figure out the number of “words” that can fit on a line without going over 33 characters.

 $words = explode(' ', $string); // Get all the "words" into one string
 $lines = array(); // Array of the lines
 $line = array(); // One line
 for ($i = 0; $i < count($words); $i++) {
     $new_line = array_merge($line, $words[$i]); // Previous line plus this word
     $new_line_length = strlen(strip_tags(implode(' ', $new_line))); // Length of line
     if ($new_line_length <= 33) { // Is this line under 33 characters?
         $line[] = $words[$i];  // Yes, let's add this word to the line
     } else { // No, too long.
         $line[] = "\r";  // Add newline
         $lines[] = $line; // Add $line to the $lines array
         $line = array(); // Reset the line
     }
 }
 $final_string = implode('', $lines); // Put the whole thing back into one string

I just did this in here and haven’t tested it, but it’s the basic general idea. Hope it helps. Good luck. 🙂

Edit: added strip_tags() to the length check so tags won’t affect the length of the line (since they’re invisible anyway)