How can I remove the first two words and shorten get_the_title()

Question

Some of my posts' titles have leading words, followed by a colon. I am removing the leading words and the column of every post title in the loop with the following:

<?php
  $title = get_the_title();
  $title_array = explode(':', $title);
  $first_word = $title_array[1];
  echo $first_word;
?>

How can I also limit the total length of the remaining title by character count?

Answer 1

$title = get_the_title();
$title_array = explode(':', $title);
$first_word = $title_array[1];
$total_length_limit = 100;
echo mb_substr( $first_word, 0, $total_length_limit ) . '...';

Answer 2

I think that if you want to get first word you should set array index to zero: $first_word = $title_array[0];

And regarding your question:

$char_limit = 20;
$out = array_slice($title_array, 1);
$out = join(':',$out);
$out = substr($out, 0, $char_limit).'...';