PHP string/word processing question

Question

Lets say I have the following sentence:

A quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog.

However I have a limit, that only 25 characters can be allowed in that sentence. This might leave me with something like:

A quick brown fox jum

However, that sentence doesn't make any grammatical sense, so I would prefer to find the last word which we can allow while staying in the 25 char limit. This will give us something like:

A quick brown fox

Which will be less than the 25 char limit, however it makes more grammatical sense. I.e the word isn't broken up, we have the maximum number of comprehensible words while staying in the limit.

How can I code a function which will take a string, and a char limit such as 25, and if the string exceeds the limit, returns the string with the max number of words possible?

Answer 1

It's easy enough using regex:

function first_few_words($text, $limit) {
    // grab one extra letter - it might be a space
    $text = substr($text, 0, $limit + 1);
    // take off non-word characters + part of word at end
    $text = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9_\-]+[a-z0-9_\-]*\z/i', '', $text);
    return $text;
}

echo first_few_words("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", 25);

Some extra features of this implementation:

• Splits words at linebreaks and tabs also.
• Saves an extra word which ends at character 25.

Edit: changed regex so that only letters, digits, '_' and '-' are considered word characters.