[Sean S]

basically here is what I did and it worked for me, first I called the variable in a string, and then I created another variable that outputs the substr function using that string that I created,

$string = "$blogentry";
$rest = substr("$string", 0, 50) . "...";

echo "$rest"

basically that 0 is where you want the counting to start, and 50 is the amount that you want to limit. So for me, the counting is going to start from the first (0) character and it's going to stop after the 50th char, and after that it is going to place the "...". Now I'm new to this myself and this way worked for me, someone else here could probably make it work easier than that, hope that helps