Retrieving only partial results

Anon

How would one go about retrieving only a pratial amount of data stored in a field of a MySQL db table?
for example i query a field called 'w_f_content' which contains several rows of text. I only want to show say 15 words or lines of text or characters or whatever...

<?php

$wine_food_result = tep_db_query("select * from wine_food where w_f_id = $w_f_id");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($wine_food_result)) {
$w_f_id=$row[0];
$w_f_content=$row[1];
}
?>

in this example <? echo "$w_f_content"; ?> would display all the text in the field but i wish to cut it off after 15 lines (words, etc)...

In other words the output would be something like: "This is a great choice for certain occasions depending on..."
where it would then stop the output.

So far I have concluded that I could use htmspecialchars() but I am not sure how to apply it.
Help is appreciated.

Anon

If you want to limit by number of chars, use substr(). Showing a specified number of lines is only a little harder:

  $lines = split('\n', $w_f_content, 15);
  $limited_lines = join( $lines, '\n');

or words:

  $words = split('[ \n]+', $w_f_content, 15);
  $limited_words = join( $words, ' ');

Note this last will remove any newlines and replace them with spaces in the output.