README

This is a class to cut HTML while preserving (to an extent) HTML structure. Can be used to create previews of articles, written in HTML and stored in database, for example. Will work just as well with regular text.

Why?

This class has some benefits:

1. Preserve HTML tags, unless they are empty.
2. Preserve words.
3. Remove some orphaned punctuation signs at the end of the cut string.
4. Remove HTML tags, that you would not want in a preview (optional).
5. Limit number of paragraphs (optional).
6. Add an ellipsis if text was cut (optional).

Details on usage

Cut(\DOMNode|string $string, int $length, int $paragraphs = 0, string $ellipsis = '…', bool $strip_unwanted = true)

$string is the text you want to cut. This argument also accepts \DOMNode objects, but it's not intended, that you will send them to it: this is simply a requirement due to recursive nature of the function.
$length is the expected maximum of the resulting text. Note, that due to words preservation result may be a bit longer, but normally, not by much.
$paragraphs is the maximum number of paragraphs in the result. In this case paragraph means not only text with following new line (or end of string) and <p> tags, but also some other HTML tags, that are generally shown as if a new paragraph, like <li>. This is useful if you want to limit the number of lines shown in your previews. Cutting by characters should be enough, but if the content you are sharing starts with multiple short lines (for example, a poem), this may result in a preview, that will be longer, than the rest. Setting this to a value more than 0 will help prevent that. List of tags to treat as paragraphs can be edited before calling the function by directly modifying $paragraph_tags class variable.
$ellipsis is an optional text, that you want to display after the cut text. Normally you would want this to be a link like "Read More" or something else. Defaults to unicode vertical lower ellipsis symbol … (not ...).
$strip_unwanted if set to true will remove any tags, that you may not want to be shown in preview, like images and tables. List of tags to remove can be directly modified by editing $extra_tags class variable.
NOTICE: previous versions used nl2br when returning the string, but this was removed. If you want to "style" new lines in any way, please, use a separate function.

Example:

require __DIR__.'/lib/HTMLCut/src/Cut.php';
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML('<div>Testing cutting function</div>');
echo \Simbiat\HTML\Cut::cut($doc, 10);
exit;

will output:

<div>Testing</div>…