Splitting html string after so many words

Question

I have a string that if it is longer than lets say 10 words, I want to split it into two parts. The second part will be included else-where after a 'more' link.

The string will hold html tags too though. For an example the string could be:

<p>This is just a test string with more words than the <strong>amount allow</strong> before split, blah blah blah</p>

So in the case I would want:

$string[0] // <p>This is just a test string with more words than</p>;
$string[1] // <p>the <strong>amount allow</strong> before split, blah blah blah</p>;

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Well, I've had the same issues. I solved this in letting my news-writers allow to use "[intro]...[/intro]"-Tags within their texts. Then I parsed the tags with a regex.

If the cutting should be done automatically without using special tags, it's a bit more difficult. You could use the substr() -function. But then you would have problems with the html-tags. Therefore I would cut them as well with something like: substr(strip_tags($text), 0, 50) . This would allow 50 chars to be displayed, exclusive the html-tags.

Maybe this can help you :)

Answer 2

It's not trivial, but here's an idea:

• Iterate through the string, character by character
• keep at least these state variables:
  • $inTag – whether you're inside a tag
  • $inAttribute – whether you're inside a tag attribute (where ">" doesn't end the tag)
  • $currentTagSoFar – all the characters of the current tag. Would start with "s", then "st", "str", etc., until "strong"
  • $openedTags – stack variable where you put the currently opened tags (push when you find an opening tag, pop when you find a closing one)
  • $wordsSoFar – the number of words you've found so far
  • maybe also $insideComment , depending on how thorough you want to be
• When you reach your target number of words, pop the tags from the stack and add the remaning closing tags to the string.