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text_helper:character_limiter
 
Al James
Posted: 27 July 2007 06:02 AM   [ Ignore ]
Joined: 2007-07-14
26 posts

Ok, not exactly a bug (its documented) but slightly silly behavior if you ask me:

The character_limiter helper normally returns a string larger than the max length specified. This is silly, what if I want to store the text in a limited length VARCHAR field? You could still have some truncation occurring!

Better:

function character_limiter($str, $n = 500, $end_char = '…')
{
    if (strlen($str) < $n)
    {
        return $str;
    }
        
    $str = preg_replace("/\s+/", ' ', preg_replace("/(\r\n|\r|\n)/", " ", $str));

    if (strlen($str) <= $n)
    {
        return $str;
    }
                                    
    $out = "";
    $n--; //for end_char
    foreach (explode(' ', trim($str)) as $val)
    {

        if (strlen($out.$val.' ') >= $n)
        {
            return trim($out).$end_char;
        }        
        $out .= $val.' ';            
    }
} 
 
mrlucas
Posted: 28 July 2007 08:59 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 1 ]   [ Rating: 0 ]
Avatar
Joined: 2007-07-28
1 posts
Al James - 27 July 2007 10:02 AM
$n--; //for end_char 

It’s not a solution because You must know size of $end_char, i.e. standard $end_char has 7 char so You must put this

$n -= 7; 


I have found bug too. When last word in string was between string length and limiter, function return string(without changes) and end character, i.e.

character_limiter('Hello world', 10); 
return:

Hello world…

My solution(maybe it help You Al James):

function character_limiter($str, $n = 500, $end_char = '&#8230;')
{
    $len = strlen($str);//length of original string
    
    if (strlen($str) < $n)
    {
        return $str;
    }
        
    $str = preg_replace("/\s+/", ' ', preg_replace("/(\r\n|\r|\n)/", " ", $str));

    if (strlen($str) <= $n)
    {
        return $str;
    }
                                    
    $out = "";
    foreach (explode(' ', trim($str)) as $val)
    {
        $out .= $val.' ';
        if (strlen(trim($out)) == $len) // if length not change return original string
        { 
            return trim($out);
        }
        elseif (strlen($out) >= $n)
        {
            return trim($out).$end_char;
        }        
    }
} 

Sorry for my bad english smirk