excerpt in characters

Question

I have code in functions.php:

function string_limit_words($string, $word_limit)
{
  $words = explode(' ', $string, ($word_limit + 1));
  if(count($words) > $word_limit)
  array_pop($words);
  return implode(' ', $words);
}

but i need to limit excerpt in number of characters, could you help me with that?

Answer 1

i used this code in one of my last projects:

function ng_get_excerpt($count){
  $permalink = get_permalink($post->ID);
  $excerpt = get_the_content();
  $excerpt = strip_tags($excerpt);
  $excerpt = substr($excerpt, 0, $count);
  $excerpt = substr($excerpt, 0, strripos($excerpt, " "));
  $excerpt = rtrim($excerpt,",.;:- _!$&#");
  $excerpt = $excerpt.'<a href="'.$permalink.'" style="text-decoration: none;">&nbsp;(...)</a>';
  return $excerpt;
}

i got that from here:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/limit-excerpt-length-by-characters

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10923955/make-function-that-limits-text-not-show-last-punctuation-mark

it has the advantage of not allowing punctation on the end and ending with the last complete word

Answer 2

Use the function utf8_truncate() from this answer and fight your way through wp_trim_excerpt().

Sample code, not tested:

add_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'wpse_69436_excerpt_more' );

function wpse_69436_excerpt_more( $more )
{
    add_filter( 'wp_trim_excerpt', 'wpse_69436_trim_excerpt' );
    // we remove the more text here
    return '';
}

function wpse_69436_trim_excerpt( $excerpt )
{
    return utf8_truncate( $excerpt, 300 );
}

Answer 3

WordPress has a filter for that which is conveniently named excerpt_length and it accepts a number of chars so:

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 50;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

change 50 to whatever limit you want.

Update per @toscho comment:

that is the solution above is for words as well and not for chars so here is a quick one:

add_filter('the_excerpt','excerpt_char_limit');
function excerpt_char_limit($e){
    return substr($e,0,50);
}