How to limit the characters shown on the page - get_content

Question

I've the below php to display the content of the post id#9 on my 'home page' of my site, so that whenever the client updates the page, it's reflected on the homepage as well - rather than having to make the change twice.

At the moment all the post content is being shown, I need to strip it down to about 100 words...

Any ideas?

<?php $id=9; $post = get_page($id); $content = apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content); echo $content;  ?>

Answer 1

For the excerpt, you can use this function but for the content, it will create problems with the html, so you'll have to handle that yourself

function limit_words($phrase, $len) {
    $len = (int) $len;
    if (str_word_count($phrase) > $len) {
        $keys = array_keys(str_word_count($phrase, 2));
        $phrase = substr($phrase, 0, $keys[$len]);
    }
    return $phrase;
}

The above goes into functions.php. Then you can use it anywhere inside your template files or even your functions.php file. For eg. in a template file

$excerpt = get_the_excerpt();
$new_excerpt = limit_words($excerpt, 10);
// change 10 to the number of words
echo $new_excerpt;