Am I misunderstanding strlen()?

Question

I'm trying to properly understand strlen() in PHP to make a application where text is shortened and finished with a ...

My code:

  $prize_text = "Learn how to eat pizza TODAY";
          if (strlen($prize_text) > 24) {
        $prize_text = substr($prize_text, 0, 21) . '...';
        }

$prize_text = "Watch Good Day Sunshine Today!";

$prize_text = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

Why is everything not matching up? I want one uniform standard of shortening the text and then appending three dots. What is wrong with my code?

Answer 1

Wrong tool for the job. You want CSS instead to avoid the breaking problem you're having.

#element {
  overflow: hidden;
  white-space: nowrap;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

Advantages

• You can hide/show the text at will, whereas with PHP the text sent is already rendered in the document.
• Will work for multiple situations whereas the PHP is hard-coded.