PHP string/word processing question

Question

Lets say I have the following sentence:

A quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog.

However I have a limit, that only 25 characters can be allowed in that sentence. This might leave me with something like:

A quick brown fox jum

However, that sentence doesn't make any grammatical sense, so I would prefer to find the last word which we can allow while staying in the 25 char limit. This will give us something like:

A quick brown fox

Which will be less than the 25 char limit, however it makes more grammatical sense. I.e the word isn't broken up, we have the maximum number of comprehensible words while staying in the limit.

How can I code a function which will take a string, and a char limit such as 25, and if the string exceeds the limit, returns the string with the max number of words possible?

"A quick brown fox jum" is only 21 characters, while "A quick brown fox jumped" is only 24 characters, so if you have a 25 character limit, wouldn't the proper answer be "A quick brown fox jumped"? — Kibbee
– Kibbee, Commented Aug 26, 2009 at 2:14

too much php · Accepted Answer · 2009-08-26 09:37:35Z

12

It's easy enough using regex:

function first_few_words($text, $limit) {
    // grab one extra letter - it might be a space
    $text = substr($text, 0, $limit + 1);
    // take off non-word characters + part of word at end
    $text = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9_\-]+[a-z0-9_\-]*\z/i', '', $text);
    return $text;
}

echo first_few_words("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", 25);

Some extra features of this implementation:

Splits words at linebreaks and tabs also.
Saves an extra word which ends at character 25.

Edit: changed regex so that only letters, digits, '_' and '-' are considered word characters.

edited Aug 26, 2009 at 9:37

answered Aug 26, 2009 at 1:46

too much php

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3 Comments

James Wheare Over a year ago

Better to use mb_substr for multi byte safety

Ali Over a year ago

Can you change this so punctuation items like ?,.- are also considered as word delimiters?

too much php Over a year ago

@jwheare: Unfortunately I'm not confident to write the regex so it handles multi-byte ... :-S

inakiabt · Accepted Answer · 2009-08-26 07:31:44Z

2

<?php
    function wordwrap_explode($str, $chars)
    {
        $code = '@@@';
        return array_shift(explode($code, wordwrap($str, $chars, $code)));
    }
    echo wordwrap_explode('A quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog.', 25);
?>

Output:

A quick brown fox jumped

edited Aug 26, 2009 at 7:31

answered Aug 26, 2009 at 2:10

inakiabt

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1 Comment

too much php Over a year ago

I think you meant to use $code as the first argument to explode(...)?

The Disintegrator · Accepted Answer · 2009-08-26 01:57:35Z

You cant try adapting this function. I took The idea from the php site and adapted it to my needs. It takes the "head" and "tail" of a string and reduces the string (considering words) to the given length. For your needs yo may be ok striping all the "tail" part of the function.

function strMiddleReduceWordSensitive ($string, $max = 50, $rep = ' [...] ') {
$string=nl2space(utf8decode($string));
$strlen = mb_strlen ($string);

if ($strlen <= $max)
   return $string;

$lengthtokeep = $max - mb_strlen($rep);
$start = 0;
$end = 0;

if (($lengthtokeep % 2) == 0) {
   $length = $lengthtokeep / 2;
   $end = $start;
} else {
   $length = intval($lengthtokeep / 2);
   $end = $start + 1;
}
$tempHead = mb_strcut($string, 0, $length);
$headEnd = strrpos($tempHead, ' ')+1;
$head = trim(mb_strcut($tempHead, 0, $headEnd));

$tempTail = mb_strcut($string, -$length);
$tailStart = strpos($tempTail, ' ')+1;
$tail = trim(mb_strcut($tempTail, $tailStart));
//p($head);
//p($tail);
return $head . $rep . $tail;

}

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