Handy, dandy WordPress excerpt length function

Written by: John | 22nd Jun 2015

If you have been using WordPress on multiple projects you must have come up against needing to pull a custom excerpt size?

Now there are many ways to do this, eg, you could use this to pull say 80 characters of copy:

//get the excerpt
$excerpt = get_the_excerpt();
//strip the html
$excerpt = strip_tags ($excerpt);
//return 80 chars
$excerpt = substr($excerpt, 0, 80);

But I found that WordPress already has a function built in to return a defined number of WORDS not CHARS. Now this is achievable using php string manipulation, but if there is a function already existing, why re-invent the wheel?

Here it is:

$excerpt = get_the_excerpt();
//simply return the first 10 words.
$excerpt = wp_trim_words( $excerpt, $num_words = 10, $more = '… ' );

How easy is that?

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