[thelist] finding the period after X chars

[tim]

Brian Cummiskey wrote:
> I'm looking to take the first say, 200 characters or so, but I want it 
> to run out until the next instance of a "." (period) is found, so as to 
> make a complete sentence.

I would do it with a regular expression.  Something like (in PHP):

$pattern = "/.{0,200}.*?\./";

if( preg_match( $pattern, $fullText, $matches ) )
{
	$shortText = $matches[ 0 ];
	print $shortText;
}

This regex basically reads "0 - 200 characters, followed by some more 
characters (lazy), followed by a dot".

Hope this helps,
Tim

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