PHP Function to Limit String output or display

This is a PHP Function thats limits string output or display. This is useful when you have an article and you want to show the first 200 characters of that article in order for you to show only full characters when users browse the whole or specific article.

While many function of this kind are already made, this function is a little bit different because it is cocern on displaying string that is W3C standards. To explain it, this function converts special characters to html entities and also remove tags on your string so that the script could count the characters accurately. Just read/run the code and you will see what I mean.

Please fell free to comment and improve this function. Thanks...!

function limit_chars( $string, $lenght=50, $allowable_tags='', $char_set='ISO-8859-1', $dots='...'){
	
	if($allowable_tags != ''){
		$char_set = strtoupper($char_set);
						
		$string = strip_tags($string,$allowable_tags);
		$string = html_entity_decode($string,ENT_QUOTES,$char_set);
	
		$strlength = strlen($string);
		
		if ( $strlength > $lenght ){       
			$limited = substr($string, 0, $lenght);
			$limited .= $dots;                  
		} else {
			$limited = $string;
		}
		
		$limited = htmlentities($limited,ENT_QUOTES,$char_set);
	} else {
	
		$strlength = strlen($string);
		
		if ( $strlength > $lenght ){       
			$limited = substr($string, 0, $lenght);
			$limited .= $dots;                  
		} else {
			$limited = $string;
		}
	}
	
	return $limited;
}