Counting Words

Anon

Hi. I'm developing a news posting system that pulls text from a mySQL table and posts it to the web. However, for the front page I only want the first 200 words of the news article to appear (a la CNN style) with a link to the rest of the article below it.

My plan was to explode the text at each space and just insert the first 200 elements of the resulting array on the front page. However, I need to display about 10 articles on the front page and I imaging that this would incur a long load time.

Is there an easy method to count off the first 200 words from the news article?

Thanks for your help.

lawnmowerman

Well, you could split() the string into an array and then join the first
200 parts together (using join() or string concatenation).

But the, the way I'd suggest is to use substr():
http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.substr.php

$first_words = substr( $full_text, 0, 1000 );

Now, substr() works on the number of characters and not the number of words, but since words can be different lengths, it may make more sense to display the first 1000 characters (assuming approx 5 char per word to give you approx the first 200 words) than to display the first 200 words. If $full_text contains a lot of long words, hyphenated words, ellipses without spaces, etc, then you could have a very long 200 words.

I find it easier to design a text field around the number of characters rather than the number of words.

Just a thought and I hope this helps...

-Rich

Anon

Another option would be to have your article submission script split() and join() the first 200 words, and save that value into an article summary table.

This will add to the size of your db, but it will increase page load performance, because your are not doing this process when the page is loading.

Anon

Use the following sql and see whether it helps you.

select SUBSTRING_INDEX(fieldname, ' ', 200) from tablename