jbjaz

You are correct moshu. I just read that on the wordpress codex wiki.

Anyway, I got some type of solution for extracting the first ‘n’ lines of a post.

$MAX_CHARS=200;
$MAX_LINES=3;
$c=0; //loop counter
$output=”; //trimmed content

//get the excerpt/content
ob_start();
the_excerpt();
$tmp = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
//process the string
$tmp = substr($tmp,0,$MAX_CHARS);

$lines = explode(“\n”,$tmp);
foreach($lines as $line) {
if($c==$MAX_LINES) break;
$output .= $line;
$c++;
}

echo $output;

The only thing I couldn’t figure out how to do was append “…” to the end, so you’d have something like; “This is a very long string which…”

The function “the_excerpt()” returns the html and I’m not sure how to go about finding the last html tag, then inserting “…” before the tag. Of course you have to watch out for <br /> too. If that exists prior to the last tag, it needs removal or “…” will be on the next line.

Anyway, maybe someone will find the code useful.

podz:
Thanks for your reply, but as I stated in my post, I know about “the_excerpt” function, but it becomes useless of the person does not enter an excerpt. Yes, I could teach the client about <!–more–> and excerpt, and I will, but what if excerpt is not entered? I’d like some kind of fallback.