Short_title character problem

Question

I am using this code to shorting the title:

function short_title( $after = '', $length ) {
    $mytitle = get_the_title();
    if( strlen( $mytitle ) > $length ) {
        $mytitle = substr( $mytitle, 0, $length );
        echo $mytitle . $after;
    } else echo $mytitle;
}

and i call it with:

<?php short_title( '...', 40 ); ?> 

The script works fine but i am having character problem. See the picture. Any idea how to solve it?

Answer 1

Use mb_strlen(), not strlen().
The same with mb_substr() and substr(): Your title contains multi-byte characters, but strlen() and substr() do not work on characters, they work on single bytes.

For a improved function to shorten strings see this answer.

Answer 2

as the word is broken at the end, this problem is very likely. you can use the following snippet instead which will finish at word boundary

function short_title($after = '', $length)
{
  $mytitle = get_the_title();
  if (strlen($mytitle) > $length) {
    $mytitle = substr($mytitle, 0, $length);
    $i = strrpos($mytitle, " ");
    $mytitle = substr($mytitle, 0, $i);
    echo $mytitle . $after;
  } else {
    echo $mytitle;
  }
}

short_title( '...', 40 );

ref: http://code.web-max.ca/truncate_string.php

however, if you have/use multibyte support, probably it's better idea to use mb_strlen() & mb_substr(), mb_strpos() rather than strlen(), substr(), mb_strpos() function.