Cut HTML string without breaking the tags
by Gabi SolomonOn a recent project i had to take a HTML source code and break it into several pieces, all with ought breaking the HTML tags. After struggling for a while i started googling for a solution from the most inspired developers 
. After some time of trying different codes i managed to come upon the code below. It is a method from cakephp and it did the job perfectly.
I hope your lucky to find this article and save your self some time.
Cheers
PHP:
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/**
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* Truncates text.
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*
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* Cuts a string to the length of $length and replaces the last characters
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* with the ending if the text is longer than length.
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*
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* @param string $text String to truncate.
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* @param integer $length Length of returned string, including ellipsis.
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* @param string $ending Ending to be appended to the trimmed string.
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* @param boolean $exact If false, $text will not be cut mid-word
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* @param boolean $considerHtml If true, HTML tags would be handled correctly
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* @return string Trimmed string.
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*/
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function truncate($text, $length = 100, $ending = '...', $exact = true, $considerHtml = false) {
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if ($considerHtml) {
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// if the plain text is shorter than the maximum length, return the whole text
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return $text;
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}
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// splits all html-tags to scanable lines
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$truncate = '';
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foreach ($lines as $line_matchings) {
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// if there is any html-tag in this line, handle it and add it (uncounted) to the output
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// if it's an "empty element" with or without xhtml-conform closing slash (f.e. <br/>)
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if (preg_match('/^<(\s*.+?\/\s*|\s*(img|br|input|hr|area|base|basefont|col|frame|isindex|link|meta|param)(\s.+?)?)>$/is', $line_matchings[1])) {
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// do nothing
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// if tag is a closing tag (f.e. </b>)
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// delete tag from $open_tags list
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if ($pos !== false) {
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}
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// if tag is an opening tag (f.e. <b>)
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// add tag to the beginning of $open_tags list
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}
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// add html-tag to $truncate'd text
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$truncate .= $line_matchings[1];
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}
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// calculate the length of the plain text part of the line; handle entities as one character
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$content_length = strlen(preg_replace('/&[0-9a-z]{2,8};|&#[0-9]{1,7};|&#x[0-9a-f]{1,6};/i', ' ', $line_matchings[2]));
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if ($total_length+$content_length> $length) {
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// the number of characters which are left
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$left = $length - $total_length;
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$entities_length = 0;
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// search for html entities
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if (preg_match_all('/&[0-9a-z]{2,8};|&#[0-9]{1,7};|&#x[0-9a-f]{1,6};/i', $line_matchings[2], $entities, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE)) {
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// calculate the real length of all entities in the legal range
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foreach ($entities[0] as $entity) {
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if ($entity[1]+1-$entities_length <= $left) {
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$left--;
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} else {
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// no more characters left
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break;
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}
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}
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}
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// maximum lenght is reached, so get off the loop
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break;
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} else {
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$truncate .= $line_matchings[2];
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$total_length += $content_length;
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}
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// if the maximum length is reached, get off the loop
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if($total_length>= $length) {
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break;
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}
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}
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} else {
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return $text;
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} else {
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}
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}
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// if the words shouldn't be cut in the middle...
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if (!$exact) {
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// ...search the last occurance of a space...
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// ...and cut the text in this position
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}
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}
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// add the defined ending to the text
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$truncate .= $ending;
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if($considerHtml) {
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// close all unclosed html-tags
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foreach ($open_tags as $tag) {
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$truncate .= '</' . $tag . '>';
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}
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}
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return $truncate;
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}
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