In Drupal "teasers" is when you just want to show the first few hundred characters of a text as an introduction, and link to the full text. Teasers have always been a pain to setup using the default administration area because of the non-intuitive workflow involved and lack of flexibility. It is even more convoluted in Drupal 7 so the best way to do teasers properly is to use the presence of the $teaser variable and cut the string yourself in the template system. But by simply using the PHP substr() function, you’re likely to break the HTML code or cut words in half.
Drupal does have a word safe function truncate_UTF8() but it is not HTML safe. The PHP function below allows you to maintain your HTML and complete words while trimming your HTML string. The code is from the cakephp framework and it comes in very handy when you want to have links and formatting HTML in your teasers .
@param string $text String to truncate. @param integer $length Length of returned string, including ellipsis. @param string $ending Ending to be appended to the trimmed string. @param boolean $exact If false, $text will not be cut mid-word @param boolean $considerHtml If true, HTML tags would be handled correctly @return string Trimmed string. function truncate_teaser($text, $length = 100, $ending = '...', $exact = false, $considerHtml = true) { if ($considerHtml) { // if the plain text is shorter than the maximum length, return the whole text if (strlen(preg_replace('/<.*?>/', '', $text)) <= $length) { return $text; } // splits all html-tags to scanable lines preg_match_all('/(<.+?>)?([^<>]*)/s', $text, $lines, PREG_SET_ORDER); $total_length = strlen($ending); $open_tags = array(); $truncate = ''; foreach ($lines as $line_matchings) { // if there is any html-tag in this line, handle it and add it (uncounted) to the output if (!empty($line_matchings[1])) { // if it's an "empty element" with or without xhtml-conform closing slash if (preg_match('/^<(\s*.+?\/\s*|\s*(img|br|input|hr|area|base|basefont|col|frame|isindex|link|meta|param)(\s.+?)?)>$/is', $line_matchings[1])) { // do nothing // if tag is a closing tag } else if (preg_match('/^<\s*\/([^\s]+?)\s*>$/s', $line_matchings[1], $tag_matchings)) { // delete tag from $open_tags list $pos = array_search($tag_matchings[1], $open_tags); if ($pos !== false) { unset($open_tags[$pos]); } // if tag is an opening tag } else if (preg_match('/^<\s*([^\s>!]+).*?>$/s', $line_matchings[1], $tag_matchings)) { // add tag to the beginning of $open_tags list array_unshift($open_tags, strtolower($tag_matchings[1])); } // add html-tag to $truncate'd text $truncate .= $line_matchings[1]; } // calculate the length of the plain text part of the line; handle entities as one character $content_length = strlen(preg_replace('/&[0-9a-z]{2,8};|&#[0-9]{1,7};|[0-9a-f]{1,6};/i', ' ', $line_matchings[2])); if ($total_length+$content_length> $length) { // the number of characters which are left $left = $length - $total_length; $entities_length = 0; // search for html entities if (preg_match_all('/&[0-9a-z]{2,8};|&#[0-9]{1,7};|[0-9a-f]{1,6};/i', $line_matchings[2], $entities, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE)) { // calculate the real length of all entities in the legal range foreach ($entities[0] as $entity) { if ($entity[1]+1-$entities_length <= $left) { $left--; $entities_length += strlen($entity[0]); } else { // no more characters left break; } } } $truncate .= substr($line_matchings[2], 0, $left+$entities_length); // maximum lenght is reached, so get off the loop break; } else { $truncate .= $line_matchings[2]; $total_length += $content_length; } // if the maximum length is reached, get off the loop if($total_length>= $length) { break; } } } else { if (strlen($text) <= $length) { return $text; } else { $truncate = substr($text, 0, $length - strlen($ending)); } } // if the words shouldn't be cut in the middle... if (!$exact) { // ...search the last occurance of a space... $spacepos = strrpos($truncate, ' '); if (isset($spacepos)) { // ...and cut the text in this position $truncate = substr($truncate, 0, $spacepos); } } // add the defined ending to the text $truncate .= $ending; if($considerHtml) { // close all unclosed html-tags foreach ($open_tags as $tag) { $truncate .= '</' . $tag . '>'; } } return $truncate; }
You can put the code in the template.php file in the theme. Then do thi.s in the node.tpl.php file:
if($teaser) { // print truncate_teaser(render($content), 300); } else { print render($content); }
