limit the word count and add a read more link - php

Question

Ok i have this code so far which is in my wordpress template so precisely this a wordpress stuff.
<?php
$post_id = 266;
echo "<div id='widgets-wrapper3'><div id='marginwidgets' style='overflow: auto; max-width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: none !important;'>";
$queried_post = get_post($post_id);
echo "<div class='thewidgets'>";
echo $queried_post->post_content;
echo '</div>';
echo "</div></div>";
?>
as you can see into the code, the routine is, to display the post which has an id of 266, now all i want is to limit the word count in the post content of that post, let say I want to limit the word to 300 and then add a read more link. how to make that please?
hope there's someone here who figured out how to make that.
I am open in, Ideas, recommendation and suggestion. Hope someone here could help, thank you.

Answer 1

try this:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_excerpt
or use php substr:
echo get_sub($queried_post->post_content, 300);
function get_sub($str, $max=300)
{
$ar = explode($str);
$count = 0;
$new_str = "";
$del = " ";
foreach($ar as $a)
{
if($count == 0)
{
//no space
$del = "";
}
if($count < $max)
{
$new_str .= $del.$a;
}
$count++;
}
return $new_str;
}
if the content contains html elements, its a problem.
hope it helps