Outputting a snippet of arbitrary HTML document content without open tags

For example, a snippet of 50 characters. Problem is, of course, closing any opened tags. What's a good way to do this? Or else to make things easier, what's a good way to completely skim off all HTML content from开发者_如何学Python the snippet?

You can strip out all HTML tags, etc. via the strip_tags() function, which is (being realistic) probably the best way to go, as otherwise you'll most likely end up with more tags than actual content.

For example:

$first50Chars = substr(trim(strip_tags($longString)), 0, 50);

If tags are generally allowed in the text (I mean, if, for example, text contains <b>, text must be marked with bold, etc), then looks like strip_tags() function is the easiest variant to remove tags from snippet.

If tags are generally not allowed in the text (for example, "<b>" must be just displayed as "<b>"), then you can use htmlentities() function.