Labs

There are times when you want to truncate a string by a certain number of characters. You are limiting the string to say 100 or 200 characters. How do you do that? In this episode, you and I will build the utility function that will handle it for you. Then you just call it whenever you need that feature in your theme or plugin. Resources In this utility function, you used the following instructions: mb_strwidth mb_strimwidth rtrim

In this episode, we’ll take on the challenge of how to test a string to see if it starts with “http://”. You’ll discover there are multiple ways to do this check. Then we’ll create a utility function called starts_with and put that into our new Site Utilities plugin. Regex is not needed here. In this episode, I show you two different approaches to checking if a string begins with a substring: Check its position using strpos Check the beginning of the string to a specific length using mb_substr and mb_strlen

Frequently, you need to strip off unwanted characters or entities from the start and end of a string. For example, form field submissions, such as custom fields, typically require you to clean them up before processing. When you pull data from the database, many times, you need to clean it up before you process and then render it out to the browser. In this episode, you’ll experiment with and learn about trim. You’ll pass character masks to it to see how you can control what is stripped off.

There are times when you check if a substring exists within a string. For example, maybe you want to check for a class attribute or if the read more link text says “Continue reading.” PHP gives you do this using strpos. This PHP instruction checks for the substring or character (needle) that you want within the target string (haystack). If it finds it, then it returns its character position to you; else, it returns false. In this episode, you will search the content as well as the read more link. I’ll show you how it works and when to use […]