I wrote a custom blog in CodeIgniter two years ago. I revisited the code to change the content format a bit. I’ve noticed that there were several pieces of code that were commented out. At the time, I was playing around with what I could potentially do with the content. I thought I would share it here, because it will show you how you could drastically change the content of a blog by manipulating the content.
Let’s say the content of your blog is assigned to a variable called $item->content. We can alter the content by passing PHP functions to it. Let’s say we want to limit the content to just the first 330 characters. We can use a PHP function called substr. Substr returns a portion of the string from a specified start and length.
The Excerpt
$item->content = substr($item->content,0,330); echo $item->content; |
In this example, we are limiting content to the first 330 characters.
Remove page breaks and new lines
$item->content = str_replace(array('\r', '\n'), '', $item->content); echo $item->content; |
In this example, str_replace replace page breaks and new lines with ” or nothing.
Remove two spaces
$item->content = str_replace(' ', '', $item->content); echo $item->content; |
Finally, adding Read More […]
$item->content = $item->content . '<a href=#>Read [...]</a>'; echo $item->content; |
I appended to content a link with the anchor of ‘Read […].’