Reply To: Truncating a custom field content based on CHARACTER count

• dkeeling

• March 20, 2015 at 12:42 am

No problem @jodriscoll. 🙂

You can use strip_tags() to remove all tags. You can also choose to allow specific tags. Here’s a link about that…

The updated code would then be:

function project_excerpt() {
    global $post;
    $text = get_field('project_description');
    if ( '' != $text ) {
      $text = strip_shortcodes( $text );
      $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
      $text = strip_tags($text);
      $text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>>', $text);
      $text_length = strlen($text); // Get text length (characters)
      $excerpt_length = 350;  // 50 desired characters
      $excerpt_more = '...';
      
      // Shorten the text
      $text = substr($text, 0, $excerpt_length);
      
      // If the text is more than 50 characters, append $excerpt_more
      if ($text_length > $excerpt_length) {
        $text .= $excerpt_more;
      } 

    }
    return apply_filters('the_excerpt', $text);
  }

One other note: I left them in, but I’m not sure that you need the calls to apply_filters() in there if you’re stripping everything out. You could just eliminate the first line:

$text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);

…and change the last one to return $text.