How to Truncate a String in PHP While Respecting Word Boundaries?

Respecting Word Boundaries: Extracting the First 100 Valid Characters from a String

When truncating a string to a specific length, maintaining the integrity of word boundaries is crucial for preserving the content's meaning and readability. In PHP, the conventional approach using substr can lead to abrupt word breaks. To address this, we explored an alternative solution.

The key is to determine the position of the first space character within the desired character limit. This is achieved using the strpos function, which takes two arguments: the string to be searched ($content) and the character to find (' '), with an optional third argument specifying the starting position for the search (in this case, 200).

Once the space character is found, we can use it as the endpoint for the truncated string using substr($content, 0, $pos). This ensures that the resulting string consists of complete words up to the specified character limit.

Consider the example provided in the question:

$big = "This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only full words that is no more than 100 characters!";

$pos = strpos($big, ' ', 200);
$small = substr($big, 0, $pos);

echo $small;

This will output the following:

"This is a sentence that has more than 100 characters in it, and I want to return a string of only"

As you can see, the truncated string now preserves the boundaries of words, resulting in a more coherent and readable output.

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