PHP newbie question...

[ffxpwns]

Hi, I'm REALLY new to PHP, so any help would be appreciated .  I'm trying to make a script that truncates a post after a certain amount of words (Below).  And I suppose the article would have to have $description="blahblahblah";.  My question is; how would I go about making this script actually work?  Where would I put the code and the articles? Like I said, I have less than 2 days experience with PHP, so please don't judge

// this signifies how to truncate 
function myTruncate($string, $limit, $break=".", $pad="...")
{
  // return with no change if string is shorter than $limit
  if(strlen($string) <= $limit) return $string;

  // is $break present between $limit and the end of the string?
  if(false !== ($breakpoint = strpos($string, $break, $limit))) {
    if($breakpoint < strlen($string) - 1) {
      $string = substr($string, 0, $breakpoint) . $pad;
    }
  }

  return $string;
}

 

And the code that says when to truncate:

// replace 'xxx' with the number desired 

  $shortdesc = myTruncate($description, XXX);
  echo "<p>$shortdesc</p>";

[ffxpwns]

Would this work better for the second snippet of code?  But I would still need to know the overall formatting.  I want it so logged in users can see the full article. 

 

$description = 'This is the text I wish to either display in full or truncate';

if ( !$user->uid )
{
$description = myTruncate($description, XXX);
}

echo "<p>$description</p>";

[Proletarian]

// I would probably change this line...
if(false !== ($breakpoint = strpos($string, $break, $limit)))
// to this...
if ($breakpoint = strpos($string, $break, $limit))

 

It's just a preference, I suppose, but it makes more sense to me; because, the first line made me think you were checking if it weren't true, but it's a double negative check, where the second line is an affirmative check to continue with the following block.

 

Give this a test, though, just to be sure.