Supposedly, one can determine number of visible characters via the function:


$the_length = strlen( utf8_decode( utf8_encode( $the_string ) ) );

// preceding should return 13


Supposedly, one can also use the "/u" modifier to search patterns ( http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php ):


$max_length = 20;

$is_short = preg_match( '/^.{1,$max_length}$/u', uft8_encode( $the_author ) ) );

// preceding should return 1


$max_length = 10;

$is_short = preg_match( '/^.{1,$max_length}$/u', uft8_encode( $the_author ) ) );

// preceding should return 0


1) The first is that the length of the author might need to be truncated too — for example, there was a time when PK had a very long name, it was something like, “PK Vote Marina for sexiest geek”. You might already being doing this.

2) The second was that rather than truncate the author and title at a fixed length, it might be better to first truncate the author at a fixed length and to then truncate the title based (not on the length of the title but based) on the lenght of the line “$the_aurhor in $the_title”. This way, if the author’s name is short, then more characters can be used for the title.

I was going to provide php code, but gave up after I could not come up with a good php scheme to determine the length of a string! There are two issues with determining the length of a string:

A) What we want is the width in pixels (or inches) required to display $the_author (to see how the same number of characters can take up different lenghts on the display, see the lenghts of these two strings of 4 characters: “mmmm” and “nnnn”.).

The lenght of the display depends on the font being used — and it is not worth creating a general function to determine the display length of a given string in a given font. Here’s an example of such a function for a particular font (Verdana, 10px, non-bold) http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strlen.php#76043

B) The next best thing (to working with width in pixels or inches) is to work with width being the number of characters. But php’s “strlen( $the_author);” function returns the number of bytes required to store $the_author (for people knowing C, php’s strlen() does not include any terminating null) which need not equal the number of visible characters in $the_author. When $the_author is “Hs4Mm”, strlen( $the_aurhor ) returns 5 which is the number of displayed characters; but when $the_author = “Марина Орлова”; strlen( $the_aurhor ) returns a number bigger than 13 (the number of bytes required to store the 13 visible characters in “Марина Орлова”).

I am at a loss as to how to handle strings with non-ASCII characters. I tried various experiments along the lines indicated below but none of them worked!


can I use > directly: > ?