PHP HTML Truncator

This is a PHP port of the html_truncator gem.

It will cleanly truncate HTML content, appending an ellipsis or other marker in the most suitable place. There is optional support for html5-php if parsing of non-well-formed HTML5 is required. This is because PHP's DOMDocument->loadHTML (or the underlying libxml) doesn't recognize HTML5.

During the truncation process the HTML will be loaded into a DOMDocument. This can be relatively slow and memory hungry, so you may want to cache the truncated output.

The intl and mbstring extensions are highly recommended to make truncation of international text more predictable.

How to use it

The HtmlTruncator\Truncator class has only one static method, truncate, with 3 arguments:

• the HTML-formatted string to truncate
• the number of words to keep (real words, tags and attributes aren't counted)
• some options like the ellipsis (optional, '…' by default). If the option is string it is used as the ellipsis

And a static attribute, $ellipsable_tags, which lists the tags that can contain the ellipsis (by default: p ol ul li div header article nav section footer aside dd dt dl).

Examples

A simple example:

Truncator::truncate("<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>", 3);
# => "<p>Lorem ipsum dolor…</p>"

If the text is too short to be truncated, it won't be modified:

Truncator::truncate("<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>", 5);
# => "<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>"

If you prefer, you can have the length in characters instead of words:

Truncator::truncate("<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>", 12, array('length_in_chars' => true));
# => "<p>Lorem ipsum …</p>"

You can customize the ellipsis:

Truncator::truncate("<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>", 3, " (truncated)");
# => "<p>Lorem ipsum dolor (truncated)</p>"

And even have HTML in the ellipsis:

Truncator::truncate("<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>", 3, '<a href="/more-to-read">...</a>');
# => "<p>Lorem ipsum dolor<a href="/more-to-read">...</a></p>"

The ellipsis is put at the right place, inside <p>, but not <i>:

Truncator::truncate("<p><i>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</i></p>", 3);
# => "<p><i>Lorem ipsum dolor</i>…</p>"

You can indicate that a tag can contain the ellipsis by adding it to the ellipsable_tags:

Truncator::$ellipsable_tags[] = "blockquote";
Truncator::truncate("<blockquote>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</blockquote>", 3);
# => "<blockquote>Lorem ipsum dolor…</blockquote>"

Credits

This PHP port is entirely based on Bruno Michel's excellent rubygem, any bugs introduced are likely mine.

Ported 2013-07-04 by Jude Venn judev@cuttlefish.com, released under the MIT license