Truncating text returned by function?

[piblondin]

Hi everyone,

 

I am trying to truncate text from stories that I'm pulling from a database. However, the code below doesn't seem to be truncating them at all.

 

Here is the function:

function myTruncate2($string, $limit, $break=" ", $pad="...")
  {
    // return with no change if string is shorter than $limit
    if(strlen($string) <= $limit) return $string;

    $string = substr($string, 0, $limit);
    if(false !== ($breakpoint = strrpos($string, $break))) {
      $string = substr($string, 0, $breakpoint);
    }

    return $string . $pad;
  }

Here's the code that is generating the HTML:

<?php 
$summary = blurb(1);
$shortdesc = myTruncate2($summary, 10);
echo "<p>$shortdesc</p>";
?>

 

This is displaying full stories, the same as I would get with blurb(1) or echo $summary

 

blurb() is a function that returns the summary of our stories, so that blurb(4) would return the text of the story with key = 4 in the MySQL database.

 

I noticed that when I try strlen($shortdesc), it returns 0.

 

Any suggestions? Thanks!

 

[premiso]

Just tried this:

 

<?php

$summary = "some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. some tideous summary that I just decided to copy. x";

$trunc = myTruncate2($summary, 10);

echo $trunc;

/*
Outputs: 
some tideo...
*/
function myTruncate2($string, $limit, $break="", $pad="...")
  {
    // return with no change if string is shorter than $limit
    if(strlen($string) <= $limit) return $string;

    $string = substr($string, 0, $limit);
    if(false !== ($breakpoint = strrpos($string, $break))) {
      $string = substr($string, 0, $breakpoint);
    }

    return $string . $pad;
  }

?>

 

And it worked as expected. Perhaps your blurb function is echoing the content instead of returning it as a string. To capture the echo look into ob_start and ob_get_clean to add around the $summary = portion. Or, the more preferred method, modify the blurb function to return the summary and not echo it.

[piblondin]

That is exactly the issue. Going to try to figure this out now. The following is the blurb() function from the functions.php file that we're including:

function blurb($storyId)
{
   $query = "SELECT blurb FROM `testdate` WHERE story_id = $storyId";
   $result = mysql_query($query);

   if ($result)
   {
      $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
      echo $row['blurb'];
  
   }

 

[wildteen88]

Use return not echo

 

http://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.returning-values.php

[piblondin]

Yup, got it working! Thanks, guys!