PHP Strings Wrapping Text at a Certain Line Length

PHP Strings

Wrapping Text at a Certain Line Length

Problem

You need to wrap lines in a string. For example, you want to display text by using <pre> and </pre> tags but have it stay within a regularly sized browser window.

Solution

Use wordwrap():

                $s = "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent ↵
                a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition ↵
                that all men are created equal.";

                print "<pre>\n".wordwrap($s)."\n</pre>";

This prints:

                <pre>
                Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent
                a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that
                all men are created equal.
                </pre>


Discussion

By default, wordwrap() wraps text at 75 characters per line. An optional second argument specifies a different line length:

                print wordwrap($s,50);


This prints:

                Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought

                forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in

                liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all

                men are created equal.

Other characters besides \n can be used for line breaks. For double spacing, use "\n\n":

                print wordwrap($s,50,"\n\n");

This prints:

                Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought

                forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in

                liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all

                men are created equal.

There is an optional fourth argument to wordwrap() that controls the treatment of words

that are longer than the specified line length. If this argument is 1, these words are wrapped. Otherwise, they span past the specified line length:

                print wordwrap('jabberwocky',5) . "\n";

                print wordwrap('jabberwocky',5,"\n",1);

This prints:

                jabberwocky

                jabbe

                rwock

                y