Adding [...] string for a custom excerpt function

Question

My blog is photo-oriented and the theme has a special excerpt function that, for better or for worse, I'd like to keep using. Anyway, it displays the excerpt and then the "More", but it just completely cuts of the excerpt, which I think looks a bit odd, especially mid sentence.

Not really sure what kind of change has to be made here, and would if go into the custom excerpt function itself, or as a separate function called by the excerpt function?

Answer 1

I have a custom except function I use all the time, it will cut off in the middle of a sentence, but it works great. Just drop this baby into your functions.php and then <?php the_excerpt_truncate(100); ?> just change the 100 to your desired character limit.

// THE EXCERPT MAX CHAR

function the_excerpt_truncate($charlength) {
    $excerpt = get_the_excerpt();
    $charlength++;

    if ( mb_strlen( $excerpt ) > $charlength ) {
        $subex = mb_substr( $excerpt, 0, $charlength - 5 );
        $exwords = explode( ' ', $subex );
        $excut = - ( mb_strlen( $exwords[ count( $exwords ) - 1 ] ) );
        if ( $excut < 0 ) {
            echo mb_substr( $subex, 0, $excut );
        } else {
            echo $subex;
        }
        echo '...';
    } else {
        echo $excerpt;
    }
}

Answer 2

You can specify the length of the excerpt with this function (hopefully your custom function is using this to trim the length)

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 99999; //or something bigger
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

There's more information on excerpt customizing here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_excerpt