Limiting the amount of characters displayed

Hello, hope someone can point me in the right direction, i’m sure this is possible but after looking around and trying to change the code myself i can’t seem to work it out

The following piece of code displays my recent posts, I would like it to also limit the amount of characters displayed in case the name of a post is to long.

<?php
$how_many=5; //How many posts do you want to show
require_once(‘wp-config.php’); // Change this for your path to wp-config.php file ?>
<ol id=”whats-new”>
<?
$news=$wpdb->get_results(“SELECT ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE post_type=\”post\” AND post_status=\”publish\” ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT $how_many”);
foreach($news as $np){
printf (“%s”, $np->ID,$np->post_title);
}?>

Thanks