First Words

First Words

If you have ever need to grab the first few words of a string, then this simple function allows you to specify exactly how many words you want and even has a tail that defaults to three dots. This, of course, can be changed to a read more link or anything you like. Enjoy!


<?php
/***
 * @snarf the first n words from a string
 *
 * @param string $string
 *
 * @param int $num
 *
 * @param string $tail
 *
 * @return string
 */
function first_words($string, $num, $tail='&nbsp;...')
{
        /** words into an array **/
        $words = str_word_count($string, 2);

        /*** get the first $num words ***/
        $firstwords = array_slice( $words, 0, $num);

        /** return words in a string **/
        return  implode(' ', $firstwords).$tail;
}

 /*** a string ***/
 $string = 'Heather was hoping to hop to Tahiti to hack a hibiscus to hang on her hat';

 /*** get the first 5 words ***/
 echo first_words( $string, 5);
?>

The output from the above script will look like this:

Heather was hoping to hop ...

I have recieved many requests from PHPRO.ORG regulars for a method of achieving this same result when SELECTing from a MySQL database, rather than SELECT a whole bunch of text and then drag it into PHP as a variable and then manipulate it. So lets imagine we have a table named animals with three fields, animal_id, animal_name, and animal_description. The animal_description field is a LARGETEXT field and we wish only to snarf the first fifteen words. Our SQL query would look like this:

SELECT
animal_id,
animal_name,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(animal_description,' ', 15) AS first_fifteen
FROM animals