Product Listing Short Description

[Guest]

Just thought I would share.  I found that when testing if one has a short paragraph <p> within the first 20 words of their product description, the default is to remove the tag and not insert a space causing merged words. 

 

Default 234BS version.  Within product_listing.php:

$prod_list_contents .= '      <p class="group inner list-group-item-text">' . strip_tags($listing['products_description'], '<br>') . '…</p><div class="clearfix"></div>';

the following does a simple preg_match search n replace with a space.

$prod_list_contents .= '      <p class="group inner list-group-item-text">' . strip_tags(preg_replace ('/<[^>]*>/', ' ', $listing['products_description'])) . '…</p><div class="clearfix"></div>';

[Guest]

Just wanted to make clear that the base code allows for <br> to allow for line spacing.  One could easily allow strip_tags to leave both the <p> and <br> then just replacing the <p> with spaces.  That is not what I needed.

[MrPhil]

If you really want to do this well, I would suggest writing a tep_teaser($text [,$maxlen]) function. You may not want to cut in the middle of a word, and if your text is UTF-8, you have to be careful not to cut in the middle of a multibyte character! I presume the text here ($listing['products_description']) has already been shortened somewhere else, as it doesn't seem to be done here.

 

The original code strips out all tags except <br>, which probably doesn't belong in a teaser anyway. Note that your change replaces all tags by a space, and then still calls strip_tags(), which is now redundant! One or the other should do. A teaser function could replace certain tags by spaces, and then strip the rest (except maybe for <i> and <b>, which could be usefully kept in a teaser). It could avoid the problem of multiple tags in one place producing a long string of blanks (which will usually be condensed to a single space by the browser, so that's probably not a major problem, except if those blanks count towards the character count length). It might even end the teaser early at the end of a paragraph or at a break or other block-level tag, before the word or character count has been satisfied. There's lots of things that could be done to produce a slick looking teaser.

[Guest]

@@MrPhil

 

Thanks for the catch on the strip_tag redundancy.  For some reason, I am not sure why pasted that into the post as I removed the strip_tag from my system completely.

$prod_list_contents .= '      <p class="group inner list-group-item-text">' . preg_replace ('/<[^>]*>/', ' ', $listing['products_description']) . '…</p><div class="clearfix"></div>';

As for your other points, the sql query only pulls the first 20 words.  I didn't want to get into making this more complicated than what was already being done (was focused on merged words). The following is a function that is used with both the recently_viewed and the featured_products modules.  It does some of what you have mentioned

  function tep_fp_featured_products_limit_text ($text, $maxchar, $wordlength = 40) {
    $text = str_replace ("\n", ' ', $text);
    $text = str_replace ("\r", ' ', $text);
    $text = str_replace ('<br>', ' ', $text);
    $text = wordwrap ($text, $wordlength, ' ', true);
    $text = preg_replace ("/[ ]+/", ' ', $text);
    $text_length = strlen ($text);
    $text_array = explode (" ", $text);

    $newtext = '';
    for ($array_key = 0, $length = 0; $length <= $text_length; $array_key++) {
      $length = strlen ($newtext) + strlen ($text_array[$array_key]) + 1;
      if ($length > $maxchar) break;
      $newtext = $newtext . ' ' . $text_array[$array_key];
    }

    return $newtext;
  } // function tep_limit_text