Display post excerpts, limited by word count

Question

I am working on my php website (Not a Wordpress site) on the main index I display the two newest post. The thing is on the description it shows the entire article I find myself needing to display post excerpts maybe 35 word limit.

<?=$line["m_description"]?>

<?
$qresult3 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM t_users WHERE u_id=".$line["m_userid"]." LIMIT 1");
if (mysql_num_rows($qresult3)<1) { ?>

Answer 1

<?php

// just the excerpt
function first_n_words($text, $number_of_words) {
   // Where excerpts are concerned, HTML tends to behave
   // like the proverbial ogre in the china shop, so best to strip that
   $text = strip_tags($text);

   // \w[\w'-]* allows for any word character (a-zA-Z0-9_) and also contractions
   // and hyphenated words like 'range-finder' or "it's"
   // the /s flags means that . matches \n, so this can match multiple lines
   $text = preg_replace("/^\W*((\w[\w'-]*\b\W*){1,$number_of_words}).*/ms", '\\1', $text);

   // strip out newline characters from our excerpt
   return str_replace("\n", "", $text);
}

// excerpt plus link if shortened
function truncate_to_n_words($text, $number_of_words, $url, $readmore = 'read more') {
   $text = strip_tags($text);
   $excerpt = first_n_words($text, $number_of_words);
   // we can't just look at the length or try == because we strip carriage returns
   if( str_word_count($text) !== str_word_count($excerpt) ) {
      $excerpt .= '... <a href="'.$url.'">'.$readmore.'</a>';
   }
   return $excerpt;
}

$src = <<<EOF
   <b>My cool story</b>
   <p>Here it is. It's really cool. I like it. I like lots of stuff.</p>
   <p>I also like to read and write and carry on forever</p>
EOF;

echo first_n_words($src, 10);

echo "\n\n-----------------------------\n\n";

echo truncate_to_n_words($src, 10, 'http://www.google.com');

EDIT: Added functional example and accounted for punctuation and numbers in text