Truncating Text based on combined characters of two variables

Question

I am using a custom function to truncate text based on an argument which states the number of allowed characters. Here is my code:

function bm_best_excerpt($length, $ellipsis, $content) {
$text = $content;
$text = strip_tags($text);
$text = substr($text, 0, $length);
$text = substr($text, 0, strripos($text, " "));
$text = $text.$ellipsis;
return $text;
}

ON any page, I can truncate text by grabbing a Wordpress custom field (which contains a string of text) and running it through this function like so:

<?php $excerpt = get_field('long_description'); ?>
<p><?php echo bm_best_excerpt(70, ' ... ', $excerpt); ?></p>

This works great, and displays the first 70 characters of $excerpt. I want to modify this function, so it first counts the number of characters in a title (above the description) and then uses any leftover characters for this description.

To illustrate this, lets say I want to allow for 80 characters total. My RAW HTML is below:

Here is a Title that is fairly long

Here is a description followed by some Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

I want the TOTAL amount of characters between the title and description to be 80. The title has 35 characters, which leaves 45 characters left for the description.

How would I modify the above function to allow for the counting of an additional content variable (as an argument) and then the subtraction against the $length? I would want the function to look something like this:

function bm_best_excerpt($length, $ellipsis, $content1, $content2) {

Where $content1 is the title and $content2 is the description

function bm_best_excerpt($length, $ellipsis, $content, $content2='') { $text=$content.' '.$content2; ? — Waygood, Aug 14 '12 at 16:19
You just need to add the content onto the end of the title (separated by a space for readability) and truncate the lot to 80. — Waygood, Aug 14 '12 at 16:27
related: You should try and see if you can use the mysql function LEFT() to only fetch a limited number of chars from your db in the first place ... — Cups, Aug 14 '12 at 16:28

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 14 '12 at 16:23

0

Try this to add the strings together and process as one:

function bm_best_excerpt($length, $ellipsis, $content, $content2='') {
    // default content2 to empty string, allowing use of old method to still be valid
    $text = $content.' '.$content2; // add the second content to the end of the first

answered Aug 14 '12 at 16:23

Waygood

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see my answer below...I would like to treat them as separate variables – JCHASE11 Aug 14 '12 at 16:24
I tried this, but again (like my solution) the title is left out. – JCHASE11 Aug 14 '12 at 16:30
The only issue is that the title needs to be wrapped in h2 tags plus a link, like so:
– JCHASE11 Aug 14 '12 at 16:33
How can I adapt "$text = $content.' '.$content2;" to use that format? – JCHASE11 Aug 14 '12 at 16:34
I can make the permalink another variable, and pass it as an argument? – JCHASE11 Aug 14 '12 at 16:35
This line will not process the permalink for some reason: $text = '
'.$header.'

'.$desc.'
'; – JCHASE11 Aug 14 '12 at 16:54
the strip_tags in your function will remove any html so you need to just use it on the $header __OR__ add a line at the end of the function to construct the link (you'll need to pass $link to it too) – Waygood Aug 15 '12 at 11:22

Truncating Text based on combined characters of two variables

1 Answers1

'.$header.'