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

WordPress has inbuilt function force_balance_tags which I belive is not explored much but it can be useful in such scenario.

get the content and truncate it to any arbitrary length

$content = get_the_content();

$length = 1000;

if(strlen($content) > $length) {
    $content = substr($content, 0, $length);
}

Now apply force_balance_tags function to balance any html tags which were started in content but did not end due to string length limit.

echo force_balance_tags($content);

Hope it helps.

EDIT:

From the WordPress Documentation page

This function is used in the short post excerpt list, to prevent unmatched elements. 
For example, it makes <div><b>This is an excerpt. <!--more--> and this is more text... </b></div> not break, 
when the html after the more tag is cut off.

Answer 2

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;

Answer 3

WordPress has built in functions to do this. The only problem is that it assumes, that all your excerpts should have the same max-length.

If this assumption is OK, all you have to do is to define this maximal value.

You can do this with this filter (put it into functions.php file):

function my_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 40;  // put new excerpt length in here
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length' );

Then in your template file you just have to do this:

setup_postdata( $post );
the_excerpt();

If you need to use different excerpt lengths in different places on your site, then you can use something like this (add this function to functions.php):

function my_trim_excerpt($text = '', $excerpt_length =0) {
    if ( !$excerpt_length )
        $excerpt_length = apply_filters('excerpt_length', 55);

    $raw_excerpt = $text;
    $text = strip_shortcodes( $text );

    $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
    $text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
    $excerpt_length = apply_filters('excerpt_length', 55);
    $excerpt_more = apply_filters('excerpt_more', ' ' . '[...]');
    $text = wp_trim_words( $text, $excerpt_length, $excerpt_more );

    return apply_filters('get_the_excerpt', apply_filters('wp_trim_excerpt', $text, $raw_excerpt));
}

Then use it like this:

echo apply_filters('the_excerpt', my_trim_excerpt($post->post_content, 40)); // 40 is the excerpt length

Answer 4

dont over complicate this

if you use [get_the_content][1] in the loop you can use [wp_trim_words][2].

$id = 9;
$post = get_page($id);
$content = $post->post_content ; 
echo wp_trim_words($content, 55, '<a href=""> Read More Link</a>');