Often, I need to get the first few sentances of a long article or post to display as summary. Things to consider include not cutting off any partial words; add … if there is more; make sure html tags are stripped off otherwise we might bury an openning tag in the summary and that will screw up the entire page, etc.
Below is a function does just that. With configurable length to cut off.
function get_short_text ( $t_str, $n = 100 ) {
// this function strips out all html tags, then take the first n chars of
// the string, but always stops at whole words
// strip out html tags and javascripts
$search_tags = array ("'<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>'si",
"'<[/!]*?[^<>]*?>'si");
$replace_tags = array ("", "");
$t_str = preg_replace($search_tags, $replace_tags, $t_str);
if ( strlen( $t_str ) > $n ) {
$t_str = substr( $t_str, 0, $n ); // trim off partial word at the end
$pos = strrpos( $t_str, ' ' );
$t_str = substr ( $t_str, 0, $pos + 1 );
}
return $t_str;
}