note 30871 added to ref.strings

This is a little function I wrote for shortening strings to some arbitrary length. It may be useful if you want to display only headlines (or just a few starting sequences) of a larger text. The text is shortened to the last white space character before $len chars and an ellipsis (...) is added at the end. If no white space is found, the first $len chars (and ...) are returned. So the maximal length of returned value is always $len + 3. Here it goes: function shorten ($var, $len = 120) { if (empty ($var)) { return ""; } if (strlen ($var) < $len) { return $var; } if (preg_match ("/(.{1,$len})\s/", $var, $match)) { return $match [1] . "..."; } else { return substr ($var, 0, $len) . "..."; } } It should be pretty self-explanatory. The regular expression matches up to $len chars followed by a white space char (\s). The match is "greedy", so it always tries to match "as many as possible". -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.strings.php http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+30871 http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+30871 http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+30871