I also modified it a bit to allow for us to concat the last three words if there are six or more words (good for our headline setup), code below.


/**
* Prevent widows
* based off http://davidwalsh.name/word-wrap-mootools-php
*
* If there are 6+ words it will concat three words with ' '
* otherwise if 3+ it will concat two words at end
*
* The longWords can be disabled by setting $longWords
* to a high value (i.e. 99999) when calling the function
*
**/
function word_wrapper($text,$longWords = 6,$minWords = 3) {
$return = $text;
$arr = explode(' ',$text);
if(count($arr) >= $longWords) {
$arr[count($arr) - 2].= ' '.$arr[count($arr) - 1];
array_pop($arr);
$arr[count($arr) - 2].= ' '.$arr[count($arr) - 1];
array_pop($arr);
$return = implode(' ',$arr);
} elseif(count($arr) >= $minWords) {
$arr[count($arr) - 2].= ' '.$arr[count($arr) - 1];
array_pop($arr);
$return = implode(' ',$arr);
}
return $return;
}

I add the php code into the head but it doesn’t add a non-break-space

Can anyone point me to a working example?

arr[arr.length - 2] += ‘ ’ + arr[arr.length - 1];

arr.pop();

with
arr[arr.length - 2] += ‘ ’ + arr.pop();

You can do the same with the PHP too.

since the array Pop method both removes the last item in the array AND returns its value. Though this will not make a huge impact on the performance of the code it is code practice.

But again, it’s an original idea which probably makes the headlines in most cases a bit nicer, and the JS is small (and php is fast).