Question

So I’m running into what is probably a pretty common problem when creating dynamic websites that pull page information from a database. Say you have a slider on the front page that shows the 8 most recent blog/story posts. The server grabs the title, caption, and text fields for each, but we don’t want to return the full text of the article to the browser, that would be wasteful. So what I’m guessing you would do is cut the text field off at a certain amount of characters using a recursive function, except I can’t seem to figure out what I’m doing wrong. Here’s the code:

$string = strip_tags("<p>Jackson expects to practice on Wednesday for the first time since getting hurt in a season-opening game agains the Chicago Bears. The teams medical advisor says his sprained ankle has healed fast then expected, although he warns to err on the side of caution.</p><p>Coach Andy Reid is optimistic he can get Jackson ready in time for next Monday's square off vs the Detroit Lions, though he states that he doesn't want to take the risk of loosing him for the start of the playoffs in 3 weeks.</p>");
$count = 0;

echo $string."<br />";

function trim_string($string, $max_length, $search_char){
    global $count;
    $pos = strripos($string, $search_char);
    $new_string = substr($string, 0, $pos);
    $length = strlen($new_string);  

    if($length > $max_length){      
        $count++;
        trim_string($new_string, 120, ' ');
    }else{
        return $new_string; 
    }   
}

$trimmed_string = trim_string($string, 120, ' ');

echo $count."<br />".substr_count($string, ' ')."<br />".$trimmed_string;

As you can see I’m trying to debug. Count returns 67, while the original number of occurrences is 86, so I know it’s working, but nothing echo’s out for $trimmed_string.

If anyone has any ideas or a better way of doing this sort of thing, lemme know!

Answer 1

This doesn’t necessarily need to be recursive.

function trim_string($string, $max_length, $search_char)
{
    $string = substr($string, 0, $max_length);
    $last_index = strrpos($string, $search_char);
    return substr($string, 0, $last_index);
}

That’s a basic idea. It might give you a blank space at the end if you are chopping somewhere that’s not a space or something.

And also, it’s not echoing because you need to return the recursion.

if($length > $max_length){      
    $count++;
    return trim_string($new_string, 120, ' ');
}else{
    return $new_string; 
}