How might I truncate HTML with JS (prefered) or PHP?

I am trying to use JS (prefered) or PHP to access APIs like StackOverflow, Tumblr & Forrst to get my latest posts to display in my blog. So I will need a way to truncate the HTML returned, so 开发者_运维技巧that it fits into a "widget" sized space.

How might I do it with JS or PHP? It should

• not truncate creating invalid HTML
• not truncate words (leaving half a word for example)

I am also considering stripping out code blocks or images that otherwise may not fit well. But this is secondary

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Well, as I guess, when you truncate a piece of code, you should be careful not to break its workings [in case of HTML, make sure all opening and closing tags remain intact], of course, if you are considering to keep those code blocks. This will require good piece of code heavily loaded with Reg-ex, and I doubt it would be a good idea to achieve this goal with Jscript - PHP would be much faster and safer way...

On the other hand, if you are considering getting rid of all code blocks, first use striptags() function of PHP [you can add <img> as a second parameter to it to keep IMG tags] like:

$clean = striptags( $incoming, "<img>" );

And then truncate your code making sure you are not damaging closing ">" characters of tags. Again, Reg-ex will do the job: just use Reg-ex conditionals and look-forwards, -behinds to achieve that goal.

Once you're done with tags, it's time to make sure you are not damaging your Multi-byte characters: using truncate without control, might corrupt multi-byte characters by splitting their bytes apart. To achieve this try using PHP's mb_substr() function. As you are doing this truncation, you might wish to make your code not count the remaining HTML tags in it as characters - using Reg-ex, you can temporarily replace them with placeholders, once truncation is done, place the original values back in.

So, "simply" put: It requires good command of PHP and some coding, which is hard to post here, I am afraid.

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Depending on your needs, you may not actually need to do any truncating at all. Instead, you might be able to style the container that you put the HTML in and set overflow: hidden; to prevent it taking up more space than you want.

This way, you know that you won't be cutting a word in half (as the browsers will "wrap" it nicely) and you know that you won't be accidentally breaking the HTML code, as it will all still be there.

As I said, depending on your specific needs, and the specific HTML that you are getting back, this may or may not be an option. But I think it's worth at least considering.