Often times you want to display the name of something in a list (say, items in a store) but have limited space. 

You can simply truncate strings that are longer than x characters and add an ellipsis, but occasionally you end up with:

"The quick brown fox ..." or "The quick brown f...". When "The quick brown fox..." or "The quick brown..." (respectively) would be nicer. 

In PHP Code:

function pretty_substr($string, $length, $slop = 4) {
  if (strlen($string) > $length) {
    $string = substr($string, 0, $length - 1);

    $lastSpace = strrpos($string, ' ');

    if ($lastSpace > $length - $slop) {
      $string = substr($string, 0, $lastSpace);
    }
	
    $string .= '…';
  }

  return $string;
}

I think this would make a good addition to the string function library.