Cut off a given string automatically?

[rctxtreme]

OK, if you view this RSS feed (http://gmnews.wordpress.com/feed/) in Firefox 2+, you would've noticed that descriptions get cut off automatically. Unfortunately, when something like an RSS parser in PHP reads the RSS feed, the description is the entire blog post.

So is it possible you could have something like this where feeding a function or something a variable containing a long string, and just cutting it off after a specified number of words, then adding [...]. Thanks!

[Twey]

function abbreviate($paragraph, $length = 30, $final = '...') {
$words = explode(' ', $paragraph);
if(count($words) <= $length)
return $paragraph;
else
return implode(' ', array_slice($words, 0, $length + 1)) . $final;
}

[rctxtreme]

Now this is much better than the first thing I found. Thanks a lot =D