How to only show the first x characters of a post as a preview (PHP)?

Question

I was wondering how you would show only the first "x" characters of a post, as a preview. Sort of like what StackOverflow does when they show there list of questions.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

goes to

The quick brown fox jumps...

I dont want to split up a word in the middle. I was thinking the explode function splitting up at every space , explode(" ", $post), but I wasnt too sure if there was another way or not. Thanks

Answer 1

Try:

preg_match('/^.{0,30}(?:.*?)\b/iu', $text, $matches);

which will match at most 30 chars, then break at the next nearest word-break

Answer 2

strpos ( http://www.php.net/strpos ) will give you what you need. This function should give you what you need.

function getPreview($text, $minimumLength=60){
     return substr($text,0,strpos($text,' ',$minimumLength)) . '...';
}

Note: I haven't tested that function