Reading first n characters of text field

[Anon]

Is there an easy way, when getting data from a MySQL text field, to just read the first (say) 100 characters - eg to give a taster of an article without quoting the whole lot? Trim seems to be for removing whitespace, and unpack seems to be for fixed-length records. Is substr what I am looking for?

Thanks

Kevin

[matto]

select substr(field, 0, 100)||'...' from ...

0 = start
100 = length to read in

this example appends three dots to the fields, you might not need the ||'...' part.

[Anon]

Thanks, but this doesn't seem to work. I assume that this is to go in the select query, eg
$sql="select question,substring(answer,0,100) as answer from db";

But the MySQL references use substring instead of substr, and no combination of that and the fieldname seem to work.

But thanks anyway.

Kevin