Getting a substr without breaking tags

IanD posted this at 00:17 — 3rd February 2006.

Joined: Sep 1999

I am pulling a string from a database and displaying the first X characters of it. The string may have HTML in it. I don't want to break into a tag, though.

Right now I have

<?php
if(strlen(strip_tags($news[0]->post_content)) > 110)
{
    echo substr($news[0]->post_content, 0, 110) . '... [<a href=\"'. $news[0]->guid .'\">more</a>]';
}
else
    echo $news[0]->post_content;
?>

But say the string is

<?php
$string = 'blah blah <a href=\"http://somewhere.com\">this is a link</a> blah blah blah';
?>

If I want to get the first 25 characters and display them, the output would be the first two words and then half of the link tag.

I can't really think of a good way to get around this. I could write a function to go through each character in the string and grab each one until I reach the limit, but keep going until I reach the end of the tag if the limit is reached inside a tag, but that gets too complex when you consider that tags can stop and then have an ending tag (like [a href=""...]text here[/a]). I could just strip the tags before geting the substr, but I need the output to display any tags that are in the string.

Any ideas?

Fighting for a Lost Cause.net

Greg K posted this at 00:26 — 3rd February 2006.

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

i suck at doing it, but look into the http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.eregi-replace.php function to replace everything between the < and > (including the <>'s) with an empty string.

-Greg

Dux0r posted this at 12:13 — 3rd February 2006.

She has: 31 posts

Joined: Jan 2006

I recently needed a function to do exactly the same thing. I modified one I found on PHP.net

It isn't 100% perfect but it does the job.

function html_substr($posttext, $minimum_length, $length_offset) {
// The approximate length you want the concatenated text to be
$minimum_length = 200;
// The variation in how long the text can be
// in this example text length will be between 200-10=190 characters
// and the character where the last tag ends
$length_offset = 10;
// Reset tag counter & quote checker
$tag_counter = 0;
$quotes_on = FALSE;
// Check if the text is too long
if (strlen($posttext) > $minimum_length) {
// Reset the tag_counter and pass through (part of) the entire text
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($posttext); $i++) {
// Load the current character and the next one
// if the string has not arrived at the last character
$current_char = substr($posttext,$i,1);
if ($i < strlen($posttext) - 1) {
$next_char = substr($posttext,$i + 1,1);
}
else {
$next_char = "";
}
// First check if quotes are on
if (!$quotes_on) {
// Check if it's a tag
// On a "<" add 3 if it's an opening tag (like )
if ($current_char == "<") {
if ($next_char == "/") {
$tag_counter++;
}
else {
$tag_counter = $tag_counter + 3;
}
}
// Slash signifies an ending (like or ... />)
// substract 2
if ($current_char == "/") $tag_counter = $tag_counter - 2;
// On a ">" substract 1
if ($current_char == ">") $tag_counter--;
// If quotes are encountered, start ignoring the tags
// (for directory slashes)
if ($current_char == "\"") $quotes_on = TRUE;
}
else {
// IF quotes are encountered again, turn it back off
if ($current_char == "\"") $quotes_on = FALSE;
}

// Check if the counter has reached the minimum length yet,
// then wait for the tag_counter to become 0, and chop the string there
if ($i > $minimum_length - $length_offset && $tag_counter == 0) {
$posttext = substr($posttext,0,$i + 1) . "...";
return $posttext;
}
}
}
return $posttext;
}

IanD posted this at 02:33 — 5th February 2006.

They have: 222 posts

Joined: Sep 1999

Thanks Dux0r, that helps a lot