asked on

truncating a long title and wrapping to a new line

Hi all,

I have some text that I need to format that is fed from a db.

This text might be nicely structured with spaces or lots of characters connected e.g.:

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

What I'm looking to do is apply some editing if a series of connected characters are detected without spacing.

So something like:

- If character length of string (which doesn't have any spaces) exceeds char limit, then add a <br /> so it wraps to a new line.

Cheers

SOLUTION

ukerandi

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

TeRReF

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dolythgoe

ASKER

Trust php to have a built in string function for this :) - Thanks guys

Ray Paseur

PHP wordwrap() or substr() probably holds the solution you want - the devil is in the details. In publishing we often use a thing called a "teaser fragment."

<?php // RAY_teaser_fragment.php
error_reporting(E_ALL);


// CREATE A TEASER FRAGMENT HEADLINE
// RETURN FIRST FEW WHOLE WORDS FOLLOWED BY ELLIPSES
// WITH A LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE
// $length IS MINIMUM TRUNCATION CHARACTER COUNT


function teaser_fragment($text, $length=32, $url='/', $delim='|||')
{
    // IF TRUNCATION IS NEEDED
    if (strlen($text) > $length)
    {
        // IF TRUNCATION IS NEEDED, BREAK STRING APART
        $t = wordwrap($text, $length, $delim);
        $a = explode($delim, $t);
        $z = '...';
    }
    // IF TRUNCATION IS NOT NEEDED
    else
    {
        $a[0] = $text;
        $z = NULL;
    }

    // CONSTRUCT THE FRAGMENT WITH THE LINK AND ADD ELLIPSIS (LINK) TO THE END
    $teaser
    = '<a target="_blank" href="'
    . $url
    . '">'
    . $a[0]
    . $z
    . '</a>'
    ;
    return $teaser;
}



// USE CASES
echo "<pre>";
echo PHP_EOL;
echo "1...5...10...15...20...25...30...35...40...45..." . PHP_EOL;
echo teaser_fragment('Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party');

echo PHP_EOL;
echo teaser_fragment('Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party', 300);

echo PHP_EOL;
echo teaser_fragment('Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party', 15, 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_text');

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