If your string is not long enough to meet what you specify in start and length then the replacement string is added towards the end of the string.
I wanted to replace the end of the string with ... if the string was too long to display (for instance article preview on a website). The problem was that my string was sometimes not that long and it still added the replacement string. So I wrote a function to replace substr_replace in my website:
function add_3dots($string,$repl,$start,$limit) {
if(strlen($string) > $limit) {
return substr_replace(strip_tags($string),$repl,$start,$limit);
} else {
return $string;
};
};
I use strip_tags to strip out the HTML otherwise you might get a screwed up HTML (when a tags open in the string, but because you cut-off it doesn't)
