You are right about the period being tricky. I'm not sure how to handle that, but I have added to your code to get the basic functionality. There is some troubleshooting code still left in there. Any suggestions on how to get around special cases of decimal points and abbreviations? Thanks for all your help!
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>.</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<form name="foo" method="post" action="<?php print($PHP_SELF); ?>">
<textarea name="input" cols="50" rows="6" wrap="VIRTUAL" id="input"></textarea>
<br>
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit">
</form>
<?php
//$input=$POST["input"];
function process_string($string) {
// Number of words to return.
$word_limit=145;
print ($word_limit."<BR><BR>");
// Remove line breaks, double spaces, etc from the string
// You can add to this section to clean up the string
// before attempting to count the number of words.
$string=str_replace("\n"," ",$string);
$string=str_replace(" "," ",$string);
// Split the string into an array of words.
// It is set to split when a single space is found
$word_array=explode(" ",$string);
// Counts the number of elements in the array
// which should be about how many words were in the string
$num_of_words=count($word_array);
// find the words that end in a period - assume they are the end of sentences
function find_per($str) {
return (substr($str, -1)==".");
}
$endings=array_filter($word_array, "find_per");
reset($endings);
print ("<PRE>");
print_r($endings);
print ("</PRE>");
reset($endings);
// find the closest sentence end to the word limit
$x=1000000; // start with a very large value
while (list($k,$v)=each($endings)) {
$y=abs($word_limit-$k); // y is the distance from the word limit to the end of the sentence.
if ($y<$x) {
$x=$y; // x is now the distance from the word limit to the end of the sentence
$cut_key=$k; // cut_key stores the key of the nearest end-of-sentence
}
}
$cut_key++;
print ($cut_key."<BR><BR>");
// Trims the array of words.__Removes all words after
// what is specified in the $word_limit
$word_array_trimmed=array_splice($word_array,0,$cut_key);
// Converts the array of words back into a string
$final_string=implode(" ",$word_array_trimmed);
return ($final_string);
}
if ($input) {
print ("<br><br>".process_string($input));
print ("<HR>".$input);
} // end if input
?>
</BODY>
</HTML>