Show excerpt of short description

Question

On my webshop I have the option to quickshop from the category overview, which opens a lightbox if the product have different sizes. In this lightbox I have added the short description for the given product, but the text gets too long. Therefor i would like to limit the text, so it is cut off at some point with "..." following it. Hereafter I have a "Read More" link. The code I use to display the description with is;

echo $_product->getShortDescription();

Is there some way to limit it? It should only be limited in this lightbox and no where else on the homepage.

Answer 1

Okay, I found a solution for this. Magento has a built in function called substr that can be used. The function looks like this;

public function substr($string, $offset, $length = null)

So for example if i want to shorten the product name down to 26 character I can use;

echo substr($_helper->productAttribute($_product, $_product->getName(), 'name'),0, 26)

The following shorter snippet also works;

echo substr($_product->getName(),0, 26)

So if I want to shorten my product description down to 100 character I can use;

echo substr($_product->getShortDescription(),0,96);

I found the information on http://frontlinedev.com/how-to-limit-the-characters-displayed-magento/ where you can read more.

Answer 2

Someone posted this as an answer - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16417380/truncating-description-text-in-magento

Magento can natively help you with this problem. Just tried it myself, it works great.

<p id="maintext"><?php echo Mage::helper('core/string')->truncate('text', 2); ?></p>

It even outputs ellipses at the end.

Answer 3

I have used CSS before to limit text in exactly the manner you describe; this would save you changing code however it would not be supported in earlier browsers. I'm guessing as you are using lightboxes this shouldn't be an issue for you.

There's a great article on how to do it here:

http://www.mobify.com/blog/multiline-ellipsis-in-pure-css/