Maintaining Word Boundaries in PHP's Substr

In web development, it's often necessary to truncate strings to fit specific constraints, such as character limits in database fields or user interfaces. The PHP substr function provides a convenient way to extract substrings, but by default, it does not take word boundaries into account. This can result in awkward truncation, splitting words in the middle.

To ensure that truncated strings end on a word boundary, you can use a combination of substr and strpos. The strpos function searches for the first occurrence of a substring within a string. By passing a starting position to strpos, you can search for the first word boundary after that position.

The solution below uses this technique to modify your code:

substr($body, 0, strpos($body, ' ', 260))

The additional part, strpos($body, ' ', 260), searches for the first space character after position 260. By providing this as the second parameter to substr, you're instructing the function to truncate the string at the end of the word that starts after the 260th character.

This approach ensures that your truncated strings maintain word integrity, improving readability and overall user experience.