How can I get the first n characters of a string in PHP? What’s the fastest way to trim a string to a specific number of characters, and append ‘…’ if needed?
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Answer
//The simple version for 10 Characters from the beginning of the string $string = substr($string,0,10).'...';
Update:
Based on suggestion for checking length (and also ensuring similar lengths on trimmed and untrimmed strings):
$string = (strlen($string) > 13) ? substr($string,0,10).'...' : $string;
So you will get a string of max 13 characters; either 13 (or less) normal characters or 10 characters followed by ‘…’
Update 2:
Or as function:
function truncate($string, $length, $dots = "...") { return (strlen($string) > $length) ? substr($string, 0, $length - strlen($dots)) . $dots : $string; }
Update 3:
It’s been a while since I wrote this answer and I don’t actually use this code any more. I prefer this function which prevents breaking the string in the middle of a word using the wordwrap
function:
function truncate($string,$length=100,$append="…") { $string = trim($string); if(strlen($string) > $length) { $string = wordwrap($string, $length); $string = explode("n", $string, 2); $string = $string[0] . $append; } return $string; }