How to return only part of a feild from database using php substr but to take into account spaces

I recently needed to get data from a mysql data base but only wanted to return the first 35 characters, but did not want it to cut off in the middle of a word so wanted to make sure that it checked for a space after that and cut off after that space.

Firstly though I had to check that there were enough characters otherwise it would return a false, also if the cutoff point was the last word it would also cut off as it would not find a space, so would return a blank, so in both cases I used the original text as that was fine.

Otherwise it then used the formula below, change len to be the number of characters you want to return. If you have a set number and cant exceed that number just make your $len about 15 lower than you want that should always return less.

$title=$_row['title') $len=35; $pos=strpos($title,' ',$len); if ($pos=== FALSE) { $pos=strlen($title); } $a=substr($title,0,$pos)."...";