Truncating varying lengths of information

I know toscho doesn’t like this very much, but anyway: Converted the input args to an array:

function utf8_truncate( $args = array( 'string' => null, 'max_chars' => 200, 'append' => "\xC2\xA0…" ) )
{
    $args['string'] = strip_tags( $args['string'] );
    $args['string'] = html_entity_decode( $args['string'], ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8' );
    // \xC2\xA0 is the no-break space
    $args['string'] = trim( $args['string'], "\n\r\t .-;–,—\xC2\xA0" );
    $length = strlen( utf8_decode( $args['string'] ) );

    // Nothing to do.
    if ( $length < $args['max_chars'] )
    {
        return $args['string'];
    }

    // mb_substr() is in /wp-includes/compat.php as a fallback if
    // your the current PHP installation doesn't have it.
    $args['string'] = mb_substr( $args['string'], 0, $args['max_chars'], 'utf-8' );

    // No white space. One long word or chinese/korean/japanese text.
    if ( FALSE === strpos( $args['string'], ' ' ) )
    {
        return $args['string'] . $args['append'];
    }

    // Avoid breaks within words. Find the last white space.
    if ( extension_loaded( 'mbstring' ) )
    {
        $pos   = mb_strrpos( $args['string'], ' ', 'utf-8' );
        $short = mb_substr( $args['string'], 0, $pos, 'utf-8' );
    }
    else
    {
        // Workaround. May be slow on long strings.
        $words = explode( ' ', $args['string'] );
        // Drop the last word.
        array_pop( $words );
        $short = implode( ' ', $words );
    }

    return $short . $args['append'];
}

This allows to use it like this (you possibily missed how to use arrays anyway):

$args = array(
     'string' => 'bla'
    ,'max_chars' => 50 // INPUT LENGTH HERE
);
echo '<p>' . utf8_truncate( $args ) . '</p>';

You could also switch this on demand:

if ( is_page() )
{
    $args['max_chars'] = 100;
}
elseif ( is_archive() )
{
    $args['max_chars'] = 50;
}
elseif ( is_whatever() )
    ... etc ...
}