Limit the amount of characters displayed in comments

i have this code to make the titles shorter:

<?php
	function short_title($after = '', $length) {
	$mytitle = get_the_title();
	if ( strlen($mytitle) > $length ) {
	$mytitle = substr($mytitle,0,$length);
	echo $mytitle . $after;
	} else {
	echo $mytitle;
	}
}
?>

[moderated–bump removed. Please refrain from bumping as per Forum Rules]

you could combine the codes that you have:

<?php $comments = get_comments('status=approve&number=5'); foreach($comments as $comm) :?>
<?php
	$length = 40; // adjust to needed length
	$thiscomment = $comm->comment_content;
	if ( strlen($thiscomment) > $length ) {
	$thiscomment = substr($thiscomment,0,$length);
	$thiscomment = $thiscomment .' ...';
	}
?>
<a href="<?php echo get_permalink($comm->comment_post_ID);?>#comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"><?php echo ($thiscomment);?></a><br />
  <?php endforeach;?>

good luck ??

oh my god!! You are a legend

That looks like that had worked.

Lastly i need it to target a specific category. what would i need to do?

i am no expert in php and query, however i put this code together which could probably be turned into a function (used in category.php):

<?php
//get the cat id of this category,
//or alternatively set it to your specific cat
	$cat_id = get_query_var('cat');
//get all posts with this cat
	$postwithcats = query_posts('cat='.$cat_id.'&posts_per_page=-1');
	$i = 0;
//go through all thesse posts
foreach ($postwithcats as $postwithcat) :
	$postid=$postwithcat->ID;
//get all comments for each post
	$comments=get_comments('post_id='.$postid);

	 if($comments):
//get the text of each comment and save it in array element
	foreach ($comments as $comm) :
	$thiscomment[$i] = $comm->comment_content;
//instead of comment content you could save date or author,
//or save these data in another array

	$i++;
	endforeach;
	endif;
endforeach;
//all comment texts of this specific cat are now in this array

//if it is needed and comments exist, echo each of them as output
if($thiscomment):
   foreach ($thiscomment as $key => $val) {
//before or instead of echo you could perform other actions,
//such as sort the array elements, shorten the output
//but in this example simply
//output the whole comment text of each comment for each post of the category
   echo $val;
//add space between comment output
   echo '<br /><br />';
   }
endif;
?>

i briefly tried the code, but it is not extensively tested ??

Looks good, thank you. What would this do? Have you an example?