CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpfreebase
Callum Whyte
Callum Whyte

Reputation: 2429

PHP display sentences up to 100 characters

My PHP script calls the Freebase API and outputs a paragraph which I then do a little bit of regex and other parsing magic on and return the data to the variable $paragraph. The paragraph is made up of multiple sentences. What I want to do is return a shorter version of the paragraph instead.

I want to display the first sentence. If it is less than 100 characters then I'd like to display the next sentence until it is at least 100 characters.

How can I do this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 725

Answers (1)

jcsanyi
jcsanyi

Reputation: 8174

You don't need a regular expression for this. You can use strpos() with an offset of 99 to find the first period at or after position 100 - and substr() to grab up to that length.

$shortPara = substr($paragraph, 0, strpos($paragraph, '.', 99) + 1);

You probably want to add a bit of extra checking in case the original paragraph is less than 100 characters, or doesn't end with a period:

// find first period at character 100 or greater
$breakAt = strpos($paragraph, '.', 99);
if ($breakAt === false) {
    // no period at or after character 100 - use the whole paragraph
    $shortPara = $paragraph;
} else {
    // take up to and including the period that we found
    $shortPara = substr($paragraph, 0,  $breakAt + 1);
}

Upvotes: 2

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