Only display the first 40 characters of a string.

[jpratt]

I have a part on my site where I would like to display the first 40 chars of a string as a intro, so it would read something like "blah blah blah..." what function returns only a certain number of characters from the beginning of a string? Thanks for the help.

[trq]

[url=http://php.net/substr]substr[/url]().

[Daniel0]

[code]echo substr($the_string,0,40);[/code]

[AdRock]

This is how i display a url down to 40 characters in length and it leaves trailing dots at the end
[code]function DisplayURL($url) {
    if (strlen($url) > 40) return(substr($url,0,40) . '...');
    else return($url);
}
...
...
...
echo DisplayURL[/code]