How do you pull first 100 characters of a string in PHP

$small = substr($big, 0, 100);

For String Manipulation here is a page with a lot of function that might help you in your future work.

You could use substr, I guess:

$string2 = substr($string1, 0, 100);

or mb_substr for multi-byte strings:

$string2 = mb_substr($string1, 0, 100);

You could create a function wich uses this function and appends for instance '...' to indicate that it was shortened. (I guess there's allready a hundred similar replies when this is posted...)

A late but useful answer, PHP has a function specifically for this purpose.

mb_strimwidth

$string = mb_strimwidth($string, 0, 100);
$string = mb_strimwidth($string, 0, 97, '...'); //optional characters for end