Limit the number of characters on a string with FPDF

Question

I'm trying to display some data on a PDF document with FPDF, my problem is I can't limit the number of characters of a string and sometimes the width is exceeds, I already use MultiCell but I whant to set a limit of characters,

I tried to solve this with my function custom echo but apparently doesn't work with fpdf I don't know what happen.

function custom_echo($x, $length)
{
    if(strlen($x)<=$length)
    {
        echo $x;
    }
    else
    {
        $y=substr($x,0,$length) . '...';
        echo $y;
    }

}

$message= "HELLO WORLD";

$pdf=new FPDF();
$pdf->SetLeftMargin(0);
$pdf->AddPage();

$pdf->MultiCell( 95, 6, utf8_decode(custom_echo($message,5)), 0, 1);
// already tried this
$pdf->MultiCell( 95, 6, custom_echo(utf8_decode($message),5), 0, 1);

$pdf->Output();

Answer 1

The PHP echo command sends a string to output. You need to return the string as the result of the function so that FPDF can use it.

function custom_echo($x, $length) {
   if (strlen($x) <= $length) {
      return $x;
   } else {
      return substr($x,0,$length) . '...';
   }
}

which can be simplified to:

function custom_echo($x, $length) {
   if (strlen($x) <= $length) {
      return $x;
   }
   return substr($x,0,$length) . '...';
}

and could be made even shorter but that is how I would do it.