Question

I’m working on a site that pulls various public RSS feeds down. I want to show a HTMLless, short description of the feed entry.

Some of the feeds come with a nice excerpt but lots don’t so I’m left making my own from the full-content.

So what is the best/quickest/easiest way to take a block of text and slice it down to just the first couple of lines?

Answer 1

This function will reduce a block of text to a given word limit, so it wont cut if off part way through a word:

  function limit_text($text, $limit) {
      if (strlen($text) > $limit) {
          $words = str_word_count($text, 2);
          $pos = array_keys($words);
          $text = substr($text, 0, $pos[$limit]) . '...';
      }
      return $text;
    }

Example usage:

echo limit_text('Hello here is a long sentence blah blah blah blah blah hahahaha haha haaaaaa', 5);

Outputs:

Hello here is a long ...