Move your body (from views to Display suite)

Lately I find myself more and more moving from views fields to using Display suite layouts. However one bit of functionality I love about views is its text trimming and striping.
What I like to do is create a display suite code field that lets you do this using the original views function. I also try and keep my code in a unit and call it from the display suite (so its not hiding in the DB).

so my function will look like

<?php
/**
 * Trim body text and turn it into plain text. called by a Display suite code field.
 */
function myunit_trim_body($text, $length) {
  // Turn to plain text.
  $text = strip_tags($text);
  // Trim using views.
  $alter['html'] = TRUE;
  $alter['word_boundary'] = TRUE;
  $alter['ellipsis'] = TRUE;
  $alter['max_length'] = $length;
  $text = views_trim_text($alter, $text);
  // Return the trimed text.
  Return $text;

}
?>

You can add parameters to control the views_trim_text().

I call this function from a DS field:

<?php
$text  = $entity->body['und'][0]['safe_value'];
if (module_exists(myunit')) {
  print myunit_trim_body($text, 400);
}
?>