Developing (v7+)

shorten text but only cut on word boundaries

Permalink 1 user found helpful July 26, 2011 at 10:50 AM

When building a recent project I was a bit annoyed that shortened descriptions were cut off in the middle of words, so I added a customized shortText helper function that cuts the text only at word boudaries.

function shortText($textStr, $numChars=255, $tail='…') {
      if (intval($numChars)==0) $numChars=255;
      $textStr=strip_tags($textStr);
      if (mb_strlen($textStr) > $numChars) {
         $textStr=preg_replace('/\s+?(\S+)?$/', '', mb_substr($textStr, 0, $numChars)) . $tail;
      }
      return $textStr;            
   }