Question

$string = '"Above all," said British Prime Minister David Cameron, "what I think matters is building the evidence and the picture so we hold this criminal regime to account, and to make sure it is held to account for crimes that it is committing against its people." He spoke to reporters outside a meeting of leaders of the European Union in Brussels, Belgium.';

How do I cut this string to specified number of words? 5 or 10 for example.

And remove characters like "&*$%>. Some in-php function?

Should work for non-english languages too.

Answer 1

Try this:

// The number of words you want to keep
$numwords = 5;

// The symbols you want to have removed
$stripChars = array('"', '&', '*', '$', '%', '>');

$string = '"Above all," said British Prime Minister David Cameron, "what I think matters is building the evidence and the picture so we hold this criminal regime to account, and to make sure it is held to account for crimes that it is committing against its people." He spoke to reporters outside a meeting of leaders of the European Union in Brussels, Belgium.';

$string = str_replace($stripChars, '', $string);

$stringImpl = array_slice(explode(' ', $string, $numwords + 1), 0, $numwords);
$stringCleaned = implode(' ', $stringImpl);