修剪字符显示长度

Just wondering if someone can assist me with the following issue.

On the HOME page of my site I'm displaying 3 Blog posts from the Wordpress Blog site I have intergrated into the website; therefore I have made the index page dynamic and I've added the following:

<div id="from-blog">
    <h2>Latest Blog Posts</h2>
    <ul>
          <?php while (have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
        <li class="latest-entry-front">
              <span class="post-date">
                <span class="date-text">
                  <span class="month"><?php the_time('M') ?></span><br/>
                  <span class="day"><?php the_time('d') ?></span>
                </span>
              </span>
            <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Read full post"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
              <?php endwhile; ?>
        </ul>
    </div>

The issue here is that the posts are displaying the full blog title which is looking messy of it was a long Blog post title; therefore is there a way I can trim it to only display a maximum amount of characters and then [...] after it or ...

Any help much appreciated!

Edit:

$title = the_title('', '', false);    
if(strlen($title) > $max_len)
{
  echo substr($title, 0, $max_length) . "...";
}
else
{
  echo $title
}

should work for you.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php

You can use echo substr(get_the_title(), 0, 50) to show the first 50 chars from the title, or add a more advanced function so you don't cut words: Making sure PHP substr finishes on a word not a character