Add ... if string is too long PHP

The PHP way of doing this is simple:

$out = strlen($in) > 50 ? substr($in,0,50)."..." : $in;

But you can achieve a much nicer effect with this CSS:

.ellipsis {
    overflow: hidden;
    white-space: nowrap;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

Now, assuming the element has a fixed width, the browser will automatically break off and add the ... for you.

You can achieve the desired trim in this way too:

mb_strimwidth("Hello World", 0, 10, "...");

Where:

• Hello World: the string to trim.
• 0: number of characters from the beginning of the string.
• 10: the length of the trimmed string.
• ...: an added string at the end of the trimmed string.

This will return Hello W....

Notice that 10 is the length of the truncated string + the added string!

Documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-strimwidth.php

To avoid truncating words:

In case of presenting text excerpts, probably truncating a word should be avoided. If there is no hard requirement on the length of the truncated text, apart from wordwrap() mentioned here, one can use the following to truncate and prevent cutting the last word as well.

$text = "Knowledge is a natural right of every human being of which no one
has the right to deprive him or her under any pretext, except in a case where a
person does something which deprives him or her of that right. It is mere
stupidity to leave its benefits to certain individuals and teams who monopolize
these while the masses provide the facilities and pay the expenses for the
establishment of public sports.";

// we don't want new lines in our preview
$text_only_spaces = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $text);

// truncates the text
$text_truncated = mb_substr($text_only_spaces, 0, mb_strpos($text_only_spaces, " ", 50));

// prevents last word truncation
$preview = trim(mb_substr($text_truncated, 0, mb_strrpos($text_truncated, " ")));

In this case, $preview will be "Knowledge is a natural right of every human being".

Live code example: http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/code/25484a8b687d1f5ad93f62082b6379662a6b4713