Shorten TEXT output

[NEONecd999]

I have a box of a fixed size in my site layout where a field from a MySQL table is outputted. However, this field's length can change, sometimes longer than the size of the box in the design. In CSS, i set the div to overflow:hidden, but I would like the php to actually shorten the text being outputted with a "..." at the end of the text. This cannot be done by limiting the number of characters as different characters are different widths, especially line breaks (which can be a whole line long).

 

Is there any way of limiting text output by the size of the area it takes up?

 

Thanks.

[trq]

Is there any way of limiting text output by the size of the area it takes up?

 

Nope. PHP has no concept of text size.

[gerkintrigg]

you can use explode to limit the size (didn't I just mention this in another post?)...

 

$var_string='hello how are you?';
$var=explode(' ',$var_string);
echo $var[0];

 

that then echoes the first word of the string (in this case "hello")

 

perhaps that could be something worth doing...?