Trim Custom Field Output Length

January 30, 2020

I stumbled across this while creating a query of Custom Post data, where the content needed to be laid out in columns, and rows of equal height.

Rather than create an additional custom field, or add the excerpt to the Post, I found a way to limit the words shown from the Custom Field.

$trim_length = 100;  //desired length of text to display
$custom_field = 'my-custom-field-name';
$value = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), $custom_field, true);
if ($value) {
 $trimmed_value= rtrim(substr($value,0,$trim_length));
 if (strlen($trimmed_value) >= $trim_length)
    $trimmed_value .= " ...";
 echo $trimmed_value;
}

This also works with ACF.

Source.