limiting text output

To anyone else who had the same problem, I thought i'd share the solution that was passed on to me. It was suggested that counting the # of characters in a string would work, and it does, but a better way to do it as not to cut yourself off in mid sentence is to count the # of actual words. -- snipity snip -- function make_newsbite($body, $len){ // $body is article $len is maxwords $words = Array(); preg_match_all('/([^ ]*) */', $body, $words); // separate string into words array for($n = 0; $n <= $len; $n++){ // for count words to len $newsbite .= $words[0][$n] . ' '; // append words to $newsbite } return $newsbite; } -- snipity snip -- use it like $lilnews = make_newsbite($bignews, 80); Hope this solution helps others. A big thanks to Don Read for this code. if ( strlen($foo) > 100) { echo substr($foo,0,100), ' <A HREF="/showmore.php">More ...</A>'; } else { echo $foo; }