How can I limit the length a piece of text?

Is there a simple command for this?

[ajsinclair]

I have a neat little RSS feed parser (using Magpie) that works...

But I want to limit the number of characters of a particular element. Can someone point to me to a php command that does this? I'm a novice.

[ajsinclair]

Never mind - I figure it out:

substr($var,0,$limit)

[coopster]

You mean something like a substring [php.net]?

one minute too slow ;)

[bonanza]

Ah, but does anyone have a neat trick to truncate only on a whitespace after a certain number of characters?

I'll be working on a brute-force subroutine to do this, but thought I'd ask in case someone's got a fancy regexp trick or something.

[Birdman]

$string = "Your feed string here";
$max = 100;
substr($string,0,strpos($string," ",$max));

That will truncate on the first whitespace found starting at the 100th position.