Using str_limit to restrict a string to a certain length

October 08, 2016 / Eric L. Barnes

When building for the web, there are many different ways to limit a string. For example, you could use CSS, JavaScript, or do it through PHP.

Limiting strings is such a common use case that Laravel provides a simple helper to make this easy and I’ve recorded a short video to give you an example walkthrough:

The str_limit is autoloaded and available in both your application code and your views. Here is a simple example demonstrating the default use case. The first parameter is your string and the second is the length you want to trim it too. In this situation seven characters:

$value = str_limit('This string is really really long.', 7);

// This st...

This helper also includes a third parameter so you change the ending on the trimmed string. For instance, pretend you want to have an arrow instead of three dots. That can be setup like this:

$value = str_limit('This string is really really long.', 7, '&raquo');

// This st»

If you want to learn more about this helper look at the Illuminate\Support\Str class which is where the underlying code is:

public static function limit($value, $limit = 100, $end = '...')
{
    if (mb_strwidth($value, 'UTF-8') <= $limit) {
        return $value;
    }

    return rtrim(mb_strimwidth($value, 0, $limit, '', 'UTF-8')).$end;
}

The first if checks to see if the string is less than the limit using the Multi-Byte mb_strwidth PHP function. Finally, it does a right trim and the Multi-Byte mb_strimwidth to truncate the string to a specific length.

Filed in: Laravel Tutorials / Helpers / Video