first x words

[mtf169]

I've written a some scripts to pull out posts from specific forums to display on non-vb pages, but am having trouble cropping the sentence for display on the article listing page. If you want to see my problem, go here http://www.numbmonkey.com. Basically, I want the title and the first x words displayed. I've tried two different functions to crop at x characters or x words, but they have a tendancy to cut URL links in half. How can I crop after so many words with busting the vbulletin URL tags.

Here are the two scripts I tried (first one adds a nice "..." after crop):

PHP Code:

function CropSentence ($strText, $intLength, $strTrail) {
 $wsCount = 0;
 $intTempSize = 0;
 $intTotalLen = 0;
 $intLength = $intLength - strlen($strTrail);
 $strTemp = "";
 if (strlen($strText) > $intLength) {
  $arrTemp = explode(" ", $strText);
  foreach ($arrTemp as $x) {
   if (strlen($strTemp) <= $intLength) $strTemp .= " " . $x;
  }
  $CropSentence = $strTemp . $strTrail;
 } else {
  $CropSentence = $strText;
 }
 return $CropSentence;
} 


and the second one crops by words but doesn't add the "...":

PHP Code:

function firstwords($str,$wordcount) {
$words=preg_split('/([\s.,;]+)/',$str,$wordcount+1,PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
array_pop($words);
return(implode('',$words));
} 


Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
-Matt