Shortening a word with PHP

There are (of course) a few different ways to do this. How is the started in the database?

• Is it an actual date, in a format like this: 1375765200?
• Or is it just a string, like this: "August 6"?

It's better for lots of reasons to store it as an actual date (option 1), and it's a little more logical how to shorten it. But if it's just a string (option 2), I'd probably write a series of string replacements.

$date = str_replace("January","Jan", $date);
$date = str_replace("February","Feb", $date);
...
$date = str_replace("December","Dec", $date);

Then I'd probably wrap all that in a function and place it in the functions.php file:

function shorten_month_name ($date) {
    $date = str_replace("January","Jan", $date);
    $date = str_replace("February","Feb", $date);
    ...
    $date = str_replace("December","Dec", $date);
    return $date;
}

Then in your theme, you can replace this ---

echo "August 6";

-- with this --

echo shorten_month_name("August 6");

Does that help?

Thanks for the answer, I just went with substr() to fix it, but I'll study through your notes to make sure I understand how it works as well.

Cool. I suspect you used more than just substr(), to preserve the day of the month. For example, this command --

echo substr("August 6",0,3);

-- would output just this --

>> Aug

-- without the " 6" at the end. Would you mind sharing your full solution here, for reference?