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1. theinfinityes
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   I'm trying to make a list of my recent posts, and truncate the titles (so they all fit nicely in a box) using this code:
   http://wordpress.org/support/topic/259338

   It works perfectly, except that post titles with brackets or dashes, basically any special character, somehow mess up the character count. For example, it seems like a ( is worth two characters, and a ' is worth four.

   I'm using courier new as the font, so any character length discrepancy is immediately visible, because all characters are the same width.

   Basically I need the 'strlen' function to count the post title characters as they appear in the browser.

2. alchymyth
   The Sweeper
   Posted 2 years ago #

   you could check character manipulation like this:
   http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php

3. theinfinityes
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Thanks, I think that's on the right path. I'm having trouble implementing it though. This is what I tried:
   

   function short_title($after = '', $length) {
   	$mytitleorig = get_the_title();
   	$mytitlehtml = htmlentities($mytitleorig);
   	$mytitle = html_entity_decode($mytitlehtml);
   
   	if ( mb_strlen($mytitle ) > $length ) {
   	$mytitle = mb_substr($mytitle,0,$length);
   	echo $mytitle . $after;
   	} else {
   	echo $mytitle;
   	}
   }

   any ideas?

4. theinfinityes
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   also tried
   

   function short_title() {
   	$mytitleorig = get_the_title();
   	$mytitlehtml = htmlentities($mytitleorig);
   	$title = html_entity_decode($mytitlehtml);
   
   $limit = "49";
   $pad="...";
   
   if(strlen($title) <= $limit) {
   echo $title;
   } else {
   $title = substr($title, 0, $limit) . $pad;
   echo $title;
   }
   }

5. alchymyth
   The Sweeper
   Posted 2 years ago #

   needed a bit of reshuffeling - not easy to see what these html functions are doing.

   this should hopefully work:

   function short_title() {
   $mytitleorig = get_the_title();
   $html_dedode_title = html_entity_decode($mytitleorig); 
   
   $limit = "49";
   $pad="...";
   
   if(strlen($html_dedode_title) >= ($limit+3)) {
   $html_dedode_title = substr($html_dedode_title, 0, $limit) . $pad; }
   $title = htmlentities($html_dedode_title);
   echo $title;
   }

   basicaly, first decode the html entities, then check the string length, and then recode the character into html entities if appropriate.
   i tidyed the 'if' statement a bit, added a 3 to the limit so that everything ends at the same point (you can take that out if).

   good luck ;-)

6. theinfinityes
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   almost works perfectly.. it solved the problem for the brackets, and all lines are now equal length, but the apostrophes are still giving me trouble. they now show up right in the browser as ’ or ' instead of '

7. theinfinityes
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   sorry they show up as
   '
   and
   ’

   right in the browser.

8. theinfinityes
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   ahhh, i thought if i put them in as code form they wouldn't convert.

   &# 039 ; and
   &# 8217 ;

9. alchymyth
   The Sweeper
   Posted 2 years ago #

   if you look into the documentation of the html-entity functions, there are some parameter to do with quotes, and also the character set - maybe one of them is responsible (?)

10. theinfinityes
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    got it. used
    

    function short_title() {
    $mytitleorig = get_the_title();
    $html_decode_title = html_entity_decode($mytitleorig, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"); 
    
    $limit = "49";
    $pad="...";
    
    if(strlen($html_decode_title) >= ($limit+3)) {
    $html_decode_title = substr($html_decode_title, 0, $limit) . $pad; }
    $title = utf8_encode(htmlentities($html_decode_title));
    echo $title;
    }

    thanks for the help man. :)

11. theinfinityes
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    actually, that code still gave me some trouble, turning some of the quotes into a's with ^'s over them. turns out the htmlentities() function is unneccessary.

    this code seems to work perfectly, for anyone else wanting to do this.
    

    function short_title() {
    $mytitleorig = get_the_title();
    $title = html_entity_decode($mytitleorig, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"); 
    
    $limit = "49";
    $pad="...";
    
    if(strlen($title) >= ($limit+3)) {
    $title = substr($title, 0, $limit) . $pad; }
    
    echo $title;
    }

12. Safirul Alredha (zeo)
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    There's a plugin call truncate-title. Add the function to theme's functions.php without the filter. Then add filter before your recent post, then remove filter after recent post.

    This way u wont need to _decode_ _htmlentities_ the title yourself. WP will do for.

    Yours also can work if use filter.

13. Greg Rickaby
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    This also works (I use it all the time). Just change "10" to meet your needs.

    // Post Title Limit
    function short_title() {
    	$limit = 10+1;
    	$title = explode(' ', get_the_title(), $limit);
    	array_pop($title);
    	$title = implode(" ",$title).$ending;
    	echo $title;
    }

    Excerpt's too:

    // Excerpt Word Limit
    function excerpt($teaser_word_count) {
    	$limit2 = 15+1;
    	$excerpt = explode(' ', get_the_excerpt(), $limit2);
    	array_pop($excerpt);
    	$excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt).$ending;
    	echo $excerpt;
    }

    After declaring these functions, I use them in sub-loops:

    <div class="story local_news">
    	<?php $sub_loop_2 = new WP_Query("cat=3&showposts=1"); while ($sub_loop_2->have_posts()) : $sub_loop_2->the_post(); ?>
    		<div class="imgcont left">
            	<div class="thumbnail"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_post_thumbnail( array(187,105) ); ?></a></div>
            </div>
            <div class="txtcont right">
            	<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php short_title(); ?></a></h2>
            	<p><?php excerpt($teaser_word_count) ?> [...]</p>
                <p class="permalink"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">READ MORE <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/custom/images/arrow.png" /></a></p>
            </div>
    	<?php endwhile; ?>
        </div>

14. t-p
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    hi theinfinityes,

    I tried your code - placed it in functions.php- but get the following error for line $title = html_entity_decode($mytitleorig, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");

    Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()!

    could you please explain step-by-step how to implement it. I will really appreciate it. thanks.

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