Embedded <a href> code cut short, undesired results

[paruby]

i have an admin page that lists all the rows from a table. One of the fields is generated using FCKEditor, so the field has HTML Code in it.  I would like to only show the first 100 or so chars of the field, but if the 100 chars ends in the middle of HTML code, specifically in this case <a href>, it cuts off, and creates "havoc" in my page.  Is there a way to avoid this by seeing that the 100 char is in the middle of an <a href> tag (or any tag for that matter?

 

Here is what the generated html can look like ::

 

<td class="tdresults">We are very excited to offer three great events at the <a href="http://www.mylongwebsite.c</td>

<td class="tdresults">next field data</td>

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Pete

 

[gizmola]

Regular expressions are very good for solving this type of problem.  There's also htmlentities() which will turn the html into entities.  If this is an admin system as you describe providing an informational display, htmlentities might be a great quick solution.  Once you've run it on the original string, you can concat whereever you want and have no concerns about anything being broken.

[abdfahim]

Use htmlspecialchars

 

http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php

[paruby]

Thank you both for the suggestions.  I actually found "strip_tags()" while looking at the first 2 suggestions.  I am using that, as it seems "cleaner"...  If not for your suggestions, i may not have found it...!

 

Pete