wp_html_excerpt() │ WP 2.5.0

Safely extracts the specified number of characters from the specified HTML string.

What the function does:

  1. Strips all HTML tags.
  2. Trims the string to the specified number of characters (safe for UTF-8 characters).

Entities inside will NOT be counted as one character. For example, & will be counted as 5, < as 4, etc.

Use wp_trim_words() when you need to trim a string to a specified number of words.

Uses: wp_strip_all_tags()
1 time — 0.0000191 sec (very fast) | 50000 times — 0.10 sec (speed of light) | PHP 7.4.25, WP 6.0.1

No Hooks.

Returns

String. The trimmed string.

Usage

wp_html_excerpt( $str, $count, $more );
$str(string) (required)
The string to be trimmed.
$count(int) (required)
How many characters to trim the specified string to.
$more(string)

The string to append at the end if the specified text is trimmed (more than the specified number of characters).

Usually, an ellipsis is added here: ... or its symbol ….

Default: empty string

Examples

Changelog

Since 2.5.0 Introduced.

wp_html_excerpt() code WP 7.0

wp-includes/formatting.php 
function wp_html_excerpt( $str, $count, $more = null ) {
	if ( null === $more ) {
		$more = '';
	}

	$str     = wp_strip_all_tags( $str, true );
	$excerpt = mb_substr( $str, 0, $count );

	// Remove part of an entity at the end.
	$excerpt = preg_replace( '/&[^;\s]{0,6}$/', '', $excerpt );

	if ( $str !== $excerpt ) {
		$excerpt = trim( $excerpt ) . $more;
	}

	return $excerpt;
}

Supporting (helper utility auxiliary)

Formatting