Substr needs to account for HTML tags

Question

I'm working with Wordpress, and am outputting the_content of a post (with HTML formatting). I'm trimming it to 500 characters using substr .

I wanted to make sure that the content was not getting cut off mid word, so I have adjusted it to look for the end of a word using strpos , here is the code for this section which works OK.

$post_content = get_the_content_with_formatting();
$post_trimmed = substr($post_content, 0, strpos($post_content, ' ', 500));
print $post_trimmed . '...';

The problem is that the strpos is sometimes cutting after a word, and hacking up the HTML. For example here is some HTML I get:

<p>
Marketing Assistant<br>
Marketing Executive<br>
<br... <="" p=""></br...></p>

I'm trying to decipher exactly what is going on, but I think I essentially need to make the strpos not only trim at the end of a word, but also at the end of HTML tags such as > and < to ensure it does not break the HTML.

How would you go about this?

Answer 1

This isn't as straight-forward as you may think. Having said that, it has been discussed and a solution outlined in another StackOverflow post .

Here's the function they use, just for reference:

function printTruncated($maxLength, $html, $isUtf8=true)
{
    $printedLength = 0;
    $position = 0;
    $tags = array();

    // For UTF-8, we need to count multibyte sequences as one character.
    $re = $isUtf8
        ? '{</?([a-z]+)[^>]*>|&#?[a-zA-Z0-9]+;|[\x80-\xFF][\x80-\xBF]*}'
        : '{</?([a-z]+)[^>]*>|&#?[a-zA-Z0-9]+;}';

    while ($printedLength < $maxLength && preg_match($re, $html, $match, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE, $position))
    {
        list($tag, $tagPosition) = $match[0];

        // Print text leading up to the tag.
        $str = substr($html, $position, $tagPosition - $position);
        if ($printedLength + strlen($str) > $maxLength)
        {
            print(substr($str, 0, $maxLength - $printedLength));
            $printedLength = $maxLength;
            break;
        }

        print($str);
        $printedLength += strlen($str);
        if ($printedLength >= $maxLength) break;

        if ($tag[0] == '&' || ord($tag) >= 0x80)
        {
            // Pass the entity or UTF-8 multibyte sequence through unchanged.
            print($tag);
            $printedLength++;
        }
        else
        {
            // Handle the tag.
            $tagName = $match[1][0];
            if ($tag[1] == '/')
            {
                // This is a closing tag.

                $openingTag = array_pop($tags);
                assert($openingTag == $tagName); // check that tags are properly nested.

                print($tag);
            }
            else if ($tag[strlen($tag) - 2] == '/')
            {
                // Self-closing tag.
                print($tag);
            }
            else
            {
                // Opening tag.
                print($tag);
                $tags[] = $tagName;
            }
        }

        // Continue after the tag.
        $position = $tagPosition + strlen($tag);
    }

    // Print any remaining text.
    if ($printedLength < $maxLength && $position < strlen($html))
        print(substr($html, $position, $maxLength - $printedLength));

    // Close any open tags.
    while (!empty($tags))
        printf('</%s>', array_pop($tags));
}


printTruncated(10, '<b>&lt;Hello&gt;</b> <img src="world.png" alt="" /> world!'); print("\n");

printTruncated(10, '<table><tr><td>Heck, </td><td>throw</td></tr><tr><td>in a</td><td>table</td></tr></table>'); print("\n");

printTruncated(10, "<em><b>Hello</b>&#20;w\xC3\xB8rld!</em>"); print("\n");