X Number of Characters per Page

Anon

Hi,

I'm a beginner to PHP. I've actually learned quite a bit but I canoot quite the following problem. I'm attempting to display a page using PHP with Mysql where I'd like to display x number of characters per page. For example, an article I may have writen.... I'd like for it to display a "Next Page" after about 750 chracters and continue the article on the next page with a "Previous Page" on that one, etc etc.

I've been looking in the Forums as well as in the articles and I could not find one.

Any assistance anyone could offer would br greatly appreciated.

Regards.

Anon

I have implemented some very similar functionality...
It very straightforward.

Mine was based on showing 25 lines per page. (since I was showing contents of a file).

At the bottom of every page was a
NEXT button.

The NEXT button sends (through the URL) the current line shown. (http://...?line=25)

When I load my page, I grab this number and print the next 25 lines... THEN set the URL of NEXT such that $line = $line +25;

Then when the page is loaded... grab the 50, print the next 25 lines, and increment the NEXT button line ctr.

good luck...
there may be some simpler ways, but this works fine... (with smaller files.) (when dealing with more then 30000 lines, I had to index my file first).

andre @ performance technologies

Anon

you should really never have to index the file... it is just the way you are doing it.

i bet you are reading the entire file in, doing an explode on new lines, or looping with readlines or whatever until you get to 1000 or whatever line they said to start at.

i believe there are many command line utilities to put out exactlly what you want... like show me lines 25-50 and that is all you have to do. in that case, it shouldn't be a problem with large files, assuming the program that does this was implemented correctly

Anon

Perhaps, but I want to avoid using command line utilities. I would have to open another pipe and fgets the output anyway.

Although it might be quicker then indexing, once the file is indexed searching to line 150,000 takes under a second.

While the file is being indexed (25 secs for a 14mb file), the user will have to wait.

great suggestion, thnx

andre @ performance technologies