When displaying long pieces of user-definable text, it is sometimes useful to truncate it down into a smaller chunk for displaying in a fixed sized area.

This can be achieved with the following function:

<?php
function truncate($text, $length) {
    if(strlen($text) <= $length) return $text;
    return substr($text, 0, $length) . '...';
}
?>

Example Usage

Code

<?php
echo truncate('This is a very long piece of text', 9);
?>

Returns

This is a…