Shorten String

[lostprophetpunk]

Hello,

 

I am working on a posting system. I have come across a problem.

 

I am trying to make it so that the main page only displays a set certain amount of words from the article, then add a '...' to the end. I have set it up so the full article will display on a different page. Below is the current code for my main page...

 

    echo "<div class='mainc'>\n";
    while($Data = mysql_fetch_array($res)){
    echo "<div class='maintop'>".$Data['article_name']."</div>\n";
    echo "<div class='main'>\n";
    echo "".$Data['entry']."\n";
    echo "</div>\n";
    echo "<div class='mainbottom'>#".$Data['article_id']." - Posted By <a href='#'>Matt</a> on ".$Data['date']." - <a href=\"article.php?article_id=".$Data['article_id']."\">Read More</a>\n";
    echo "</div>\n";
    }
    echo "</div><br /><br />\n";

 

I am looking for a way to shorten the ".$Data['entry']." (without permanently cutting down the size of the data) to a set certain length, and then add '...' to the end.

 

How would I go about doing this?

[marcus]

<?php
$string = "i love it when <a href=\"bigpapa.php\">you call me big papa</a>";

echo strip_tags(substr($string, 0, 40)) . "...";
?>

[lostprophetpunk]

Right, I have tried placing that in my code, but it doesn't seem to work...

 

    $entrym = "".$Data['entry']."";
    strip_tags(substr($entrym, 40, 100));

    echo "$entrym...\n";

 

It just seems to echo the '...'.

[marcus]

Lawl. You're just putting it in, it's not going to do anything.

 

$entrym = strip_tags(substr($Data['entry'],0,100));

echo $entrym . "...";

[lostprophetpunk]

It still just outputs the '...' and nothing else.

[marcus]

Then obviously $Data['entry'] does not exist.

[lostprophetpunk]

It does exist, as if I were to echo that by itself, it would post the full article.

[lostprophetpunk]

Can anyone help?

 

The the field entry does exist. I have tried it just with that and it works fine, but when I try to shorten the string it doesn't show anything but the '...' at the end.

[nrg_alpha]

well, is this sort of what you are looking for?

 

$str = 'This is a long string just to test to see if I can use a temporary variable with ... at the end of it!';
echo $str . '<br />';
echo substr($str, 0, 25) . '...'; // change the 25 to whatever length you want. Since we are echoning this, we are not changing the actual string.. just its presentation

 

So basically, if your $Data['entry'] does exist and outputs a string.. simply use that variable instead.