Regarding "...", even the short functions are too long and complicated, and there's no need to use substr_replace. substr() works better and is way faster prior to 4.3.5 as the below poster stated.
function shorten( $str, $num = 100 ) {
if( strlen( $str ) > $num ) $str = substr( $str, 0, $num ) . "...";
return $str;
}