Poblem when creating short description of text

[mikek12004]

Initialy i wanted to create a short description of a text to be shown as preview, I found the following which worked OK

$length = 35; // The number of words you want
$words = explode(' ', $b_keimeno); // Creates an array of words
$true_length=count($words); //to see if description smaller than $length
$words = array_slice($words, 0, $length);
$s_keimeno = implode(' ', $words);
if ($true_length>$length)
$s_keimeno.="...";    
 

Now however the writer start writting with html tags to make bold,links etc. as a result short preview sometimes cuts before clossing a tag or worse inside an opening tag like <a href=... and the next element after this short description appears weird. Any ideas?

[pbmods]

Heya, mikek12004.

One option is to use strip_tags() to remove any HTML from the preview text (PHP: strip_tags - Manual).

Short of writing your own string parser, though, I am not aware of any good solution for counting words outside of HTML tags (though I am working on one!).

[nathj]

One solution I used on a project recently was a stored procedure. Now please don't all shout at me normally I'm not a fan but this seemed to work a treat. Also I was editing someone else's code and this was simplest.

So what did I do?

BEGIN
  DECLARE iStart, iEnd, iLength int;
    WHILE Locate( '<', Dirty ) > 0 And Locate( '>', Dirty, Locate( '<', Dirty )) > 0 DO
      BEGIN
        SET iStart = Locate( '<', Dirty ), iEnd = Locate( '>', Dirty, Locate('<', Dirty ));
        SET iLength = ( iEnd - iStart) + 1;
        IF iLength > 0 THEN
          BEGIN
            SET Dirty = Insert( Dirty, iStart, iLength, '');
          END;
        END IF;
      END;
    END WHILE;
    RETURN Dirty;
END
 

I was using a MySQL database. Then in the code (ASP unfortunately) I called the stored procedure on the full text. I have a site with many categorised pages and the category landing page display the first n characters. so it's character based which can leave you cut up in the middle of a word.

Anyway, you may be able to tweak it to be word based. Otherwise the simple strip-tags would work a treat. A function that has no counter-part in ASP, at least not one I could find.

Still thought I'd share my thoughts.

Cheers and Merry Christmas!
nathj