Max-Characters in excerpt

Hi Bart. Here’s an answer to a post that provides a function you could use in a child theme functions.php file. To use it you’d also need to change:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

to

<?php get_excerpt(); ?>

in the following theme files depending on where you want to use it:
content.php
content-featured.php
content-standard.php

Thank you. It worked pretty well!

For everyone’s convenience, I have added the following to my child function.php:

function get_excerpt($limit, $source = null){

    if($source == "content" ? ($excerpt = get_the_content()) : ($excerpt = get_the_excerpt()));
    $excerpt = preg_replace(" (\[.*?\])",'',$excerpt);
    $excerpt = strip_shortcodes($excerpt);
    $excerpt = strip_tags($excerpt);
    $excerpt = substr($excerpt, 0, $limit);
    $excerpt = substr($excerpt, 0, strripos($excerpt, " "));
    $excerpt = trim(preg_replace( '/\s+/', ' ', $excerpt));
    $excerpt = $excerpt.'... <a href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'"><i class="fa fa-sort-down"></i></a>';
    return $excerpt;
}

And in my content-featured.php I have adjusted the following:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

And changed it to:

<?php echo get_excerpt(40); ?>

Thanks again!