substr() cuts in the middle of & symbol

Description:

In “Read more” segments, you often need to cut the text to a length and add ‘…’ at the end. This can be a bit tricky when the limit falls on a special character.

Solution:

We can use mb_substr() instead, and first decode the text and set the “UTF-8” charset:

$length = 40;
$padding = ‘…’;

if (strlen($fullDescription) > ($length + 3)) {
$shortDescription = html_entity_decode($fullDescription);
mb_internal_encoding(“UTF-8”);
$shortDescription = mb_substr($shortDescription, 0, $length);
$shortDescription  .= $padding;
}

This will decode all entities into their natural symbol and make sure they are interpreted as one character.