if condition to limit the words in wordpress title

I have written this code to loop through the latest 6 posts on my blog and display them in a special box but there is a slight problem, when i write longer titles the title moves to the next line. I cant increase the width of my title div so I need to write an if condition to show a "..." if the title moves to the next line after lets say 20 characters.

<div id="freshlyWrapper">
<div id="freshlyposts">
<?php
$freshlyIonised = new WP_Query();
$freshlyIonise开发者_JS百科d->query('category_name=FreshlyIonised&showposts=6');
while($freshlyIonised->have_posts()):
$freshlyIonised->the_post();
?>
<div class="freshlyionisedbox"><h3><a style='text-decoration: underline; color: #000;' href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

There is a better way, with CSS:

DIV.freshlyionisedbox {
    border: 1px solid #000000;
    white-space: nowrap;
    width: 150px;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

The advantage of this being the semantic content of your page is preserved, and you don't have to guess at how many characters will fit on the user's screen in a certain number of pixels.

The substr way:

$title = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.";
echo strlen($title) > 25 ? substr($title, 0, 25).'...' : $title;
// The quick brown fox jumpe...

This is what I usually use, to prevent words from cutting:

function truncate($str, $width, $cutword = false) {
    if (strlen($str) <= $width) return $str;
    list($out) = explode("\n", wordwrap($str, $width, "\n", $cutword), 2);
    return $out.'...';
}

$title = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.";
echo truncate($title, 25); 
// The quick brown fox...

$title = "The quick brown fox";
echo truncate($title, 25); 
// The quick brown fox

Try substr:

$title = get_the_title();

if (strlen($title) > 20)
    $title = substr( $title, 0 , 20 ) . "..."; // Limits title to 20 characters.

Implement like so:

<div id="freshlyWrapper">
<div id="freshlyposts">
<?php
    $freshlyIonised = new WP_Query();
    $freshlyIonised->query('category_name=FreshlyIonised&showposts=6');
    while($freshlyIonised->have_posts()):
        $freshlyIonised->the_post();

        $title = get_the_title();

        if (strlen($title) > 20)
            $title = substr( $title, 0 , 20 ) . "..."; // Limits title to 20 characters.
?>
<div class="freshlyionisedbox">
    <h3><a style='text-decoration: underline; color: #000;' href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $title; ?></a></h3>

Try...

$title = get_the_title();
if (strlen($title) > 20) $title = substr($title, 0, 17) . "...";

you don't need condition, apply this

echo mb_strimwidth(get_the_title(), 0, 20, '...');