Php > Arrays

Creating teaser or preview text

Creating teaser or preview text

A lot of sites will create a text "preview" on the front page of thier site (say a news story) with 
a "more" link to get the full story. 

You can easily chop a string at a certain number of characters using substr(): 
<? 
$charLimit = 25; 
$myText = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"; 
$teaserText = substr($myText,0,$charLimit) . "... <a href="<your more link>">more</a>"; 
echo $teaserText; 
?> 

Which echos: 
"The quick brown fox jumpe... more" 

If you wanted to chop the text at a word break, rather than mid-word, you can do this: 

<? 
$wordLimit = 7; 
$myText = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"; 
$teaserText = ''; 

$words = explode(' ',$myText); 
$i = 0; 
while($i < $wordLimit) 
    { 
    $i++; 
    $teaserText .= $words[$i]." "; 
    } 
$teaserText .= "... <a href="<your more link>">more</a>"; 
?> 

Which echos: 
"The quick brown fox jumped over the... more"