How to restrict RSS titles in WP sidebar to one line

I'm placing an RSS feed (Amazon bestsellers) in my WordPress sidebar, but the titles are up to five lines long! Is there any way to restrict these to a single line? I'm a real newbie at PHP and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here's the code I'm using:

<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.amazon.com/rss/bestsellers/electronics/172526/ref=pd_ts_rss_link?tag=affiliatecode');
$maxitems = 10;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
<?php if (empty($items)) echo '<li>No items</li>';
else
foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?>
<li style="margin:0px; padding:0;"><a href='<?php echo $item['link']; ?>' 
title='<?php echo $item['title']; ?>'>
<?php echo $item['title']; ?>
</a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Code (markup):

And here's the result for the first item!:

#1: Magellan Maestro 4250
4.3-Inch Widescreen
Bluetooth Portable GPS
Navigator (Factory
Refurbished)

 

An alternative I would be very happy with is being able to restrict the display to a certain number of characters. Anyone?

 

Okay, I found this code on another forum to restrict the display to 50 characters:

echo ( strlen($str)<55 ? $str : substr($str, 0, 50).'...' );

Code (markup):

But where do I put it? And do I need to wrap it like this...?

<?php echo ( strlen($str)<55 ? $str : substr($str, 0, 50).'...' ); ?>

Code (markup):

I'm really new at this!

 

You already get it =)
Most probably it will be here.

<?php echo ( strlen($item['title'])<55 ? $item['title'] : substr($item['title'], 0, 50).'...' ); ?>
</a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

PHP:

 

Oh, I'm so close I can taste it!

Do I need to strip out any of the preceding lines of code? It didn't work to just drop that line in.

Thanks for taking the time to help!

 

What i mean was this. Replace the whole thing you posted with this:

<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.amazon.com/rss/bestsellers/electronics/172526/ref=pd_ts_rss_link?tag=affiliatecode');
$maxitems = 10;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
<?php if (empty($items)) echo '<li>No items</li>';
else
foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?>
<li style="margin:0px; padding:0;"><a href='<?php echo $item['link']; ?>' 
title='<?php echo $item['title']; ?>'>
<?php echo ( strlen($item['title'])<55 ? $item['title'] : substr($item['title'], 0, 50).'...' ); ?>
</a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

PHP:

 

Excellent! That did it. Looks like I'll need to go closer to 25 characters to keep it on one line in the sidebar.

Hey, it turns out that Amazon uses excess spaces or a return or something on some product titles, but I'm only seeing it on two out of ten in the list.

Thank you so much! I gave a reputation bump for you.

 

thanks. whitespaces? use trim() to get rid of extra spaces

replace the line

<?php echo ( strlen($item['title'])<55 ? $item['title'] : substr($item['title'], 0, 50).'...' ); ?>

PHP:

by this

<?php echo ( strlen($item['title'])<55 ? trim($item['title']) : substr(trim($item['title']), 0, 50).'...' ); ?>

PHP:

 

Hmm, I must be wrong about returns, whitespaces, etc. That didn't change anything on the display. The text appears to be pulled from their Title tags and I can see nothing amiss there.

 

I don't get you. Give me the link or a picture?

 

Sorry I never responded. You can see the list here at the top of the left sidebar. There are some items with white space issues, but I'm actually trying to tackle another problem today.

Is there any way to strip off the first four characters of each item from the feed? Amazon embeds the ranking in the feed, and I'd like to strip it off so I can go to an ol display rather than an li display. That way I can style the rank number to a different color and make it stand out.

 

i cant see any white space.

to strip off the first four characters, use substr also

<?php echo ( strlen($item['title'])<55 ? trim($item['title']) : substr(trim($item['title']), 4, 50).'...' ); ?>

PHP:

only difference is the 0 changed to 4 so that it start after 4th character

 

Hey, I'm beginning to really like PHP! That worked very well. There are still some anomalies showing up in Amazon's feed, but its looking much cleaner.

Thank you so much for all your help.