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Thursday, November 17, 2005

"Clip words" function in PHP

I've found this simple clipWords function I wrote to be really handy. I use it for my quotes thing to generate page titles and such. Check your browser bar on this page, for example.


<?php
function clipWords($str, $word_count){
    preg_match('/^\W*(\b\w+\b\W*){0,'.$word_count.'}/', $str, $matches);
    return trim($matches[0]);
}
?>

You can use code like this to generate an elipsis:


<?php
$short = clipWords($full, 7);
if(strlen($short) < strlen($full))
    $short .= '...';
?>

Update: Or, alternately:


<?php
function clipWords($str, $word_count){
    return join(' ', array_slice(preg_split('/\s+/', trim($str)), 0, $word_count));
}
#or
function clipWords($str, $word_count){
    return join(' ', array_slice(preg_split('/\s+/', trim($str), $word_count+1), 0, -1));
?>

Permalink | 3 Comments | Tags: Programming, This website | id 7591

11:58 (utc-5)
edited: 2005-11-20 15:16 (utc-5)

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Comments

DJ Hannibal wrote:

The Nietzche quote:

"Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you."

Gets cut down to "Battle not with monsters..." while some of the really long quotes don't get cut at all. What's up with that?

∴ DJ Hannibal | 17-Nov-2005 5:16pm est | #8689

Keith (http://keithdevens.com/) wrote:

No it doesn't: http://keithdevens.com/quotes/Nietzsche.monsters

And I went through my quotes and clicked on pretty much every long one and didn't see one that didn't get cut correctly. Do you have a link to one that didn't work right?

∴ Keith | 17-Nov-2005 5:23pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #8690

Keith (http://keithdevens.com/) wrote:

Ah, did you mean on my random quote rotation at the top of the page? Until just now I was actually using a different "clipChars" function that tried to use a similar (but more complicated) regular expression to cut at a number of chars, but which made sure not to cut in the middle of a word. I wanted to cut at chars because I figured it would be more likely to give a more regular length (which was appropriate for my header) than cutting at words, but I've just now replaced it with clipWords and it works just fine.

∴ Keith | 18-Nov-2005 10:22am est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #8696

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