Many times its required that we truncate a long string and add ellipsis to the end of the truncated string. Here's a function which does exactly that. PHP: function truncate( $varb, $num ) { $dnum = intval($num); if (strlen($varb)>$dnum) { $nvarb = substr($varb, 0, $dnum); $nvarb .= " ..."; } else if (strlen($varb)<$dnum) { $nvarb=$varb; } return $nvarb; }