Balance Tags to the_content Words Length

Question

I have a category page that I need to show some of the content of a the posts with HTML tags such as images.

Site - http://hoffwebsites.com/wp-hoff-testing/ms-conversations/

I have found this code that does the trick.

I have this in my functions.php

function technig_content($limit){
$content = explode(' ', get_the_content(), $limit);

if (count($content)>=$limit){
         array_pop($content);
         $content = implode(" ",$content).'...';
} else {
    $content = implode(" ",$content);
}
$content = preg_replace('/\[.+\]/','', $content);
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
return $content;
 }

And this where I want to the code to go.

<?php echo technig_content(170); ?>

However, it is leaving open HTML tags sometimes that throws off the page structure in some case. Usually an open bold or italic or bulleted list.

I know there is Balance Tags - https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/balanceTags

But I do not know how to incorporate that with my code.

I have tried with no luck, any thoughts?

<?php echo technig_content(170); echo balanceTags($technig_content, true); ?>

Answer 1

You better call it before returning, inside technig_content() so that it's return value is always balanced. So, the last two lines of your function would become:

$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
$content = balanceTags( $content );
return $content;

Having said that, I don't think it's a good way of handling your output, since you don't really know how the final HTML will end up to be.

In my opinion, you should either utilize the built-in read more tag for each article, in combination with the_content(), or provide custom excerpts and use the_excerpt(). Only then you'll have total control of your end result.