If you have Views module installed, you can use its views_trim_text()
function to programmatically trim field value (or any other text for that matter) to a specified length from your code.
Usage:
views_trim_text($alter, $value)
where $alter
array consists of the following elements:
max_length
- maximum lenght of the string, the rest gets truncated,word_boundary
- trim only on a word boundary,ellipsis
- show an ellipsis (...) at the end of the trimmed string,html
- take sure that the html is correct.