April 29, 2012
PHP – Summary of article
Question by user1257255
I’m working on news script and I would like to create summary function to get little of text from full text content. The function would get 200 characters of full text and then it would search for last space of these 200 characters. The function must also ignore any html or other code and show only first 200 characters of full text content.
Which function is the best for my problem and how to do that function?
Answer by mazzucci
Checkout this helper function from the CodeIgniter framework:
/**
* Character Limiter
*
* Limits the string based on the character count. Preserves complete words
* so the character count may not be exactly as specified.
*
* @access public
* @param string
* @param integer
* @param string the end character. Usually an ellipsis
* @return string
*/
function character_limiter($str, $n = 500, $end_char = '…')
{
if (strlen($str) < $n)
{
return $str;
}
$str = preg_replace("/s+/", ' ', str_replace(array("rn", "r", "n"), ' ', $str));
if (strlen($str) <= $n)
{
return $str;
}
$out = "";
foreach (explode(' ', trim($str)) as $val)
{
$out .= $val.' ';
if (strlen($out) >= $n)
{
$out = trim($out);
return (strlen($out) == strlen($str)) ? $out : $out.$end_char;
}
}
}
You can use the function:
echo character_limiter($text, 200);
If you need to avoid HTML tags, you can use strip_tags function before calling the character_limiter function.
Answer by Starx
There is a simple function called substr($string, $position, $length), which can do this.
Use it like
$brief = substr($bigContent, 0, 200); //for 200 chars
