not a LIMIT query, but....

[Anon]

I have JPGs as binary stuffed into a mysql database. I've written a www/php front-end DBA utility that queries tables, and returns user-specified results in a pretty html table. However, binary JPGs are huge (+3 MBs sometimes), and instead of rendering a bunch of useless binary data (sending 3MBs of text to the client's browser), I'd like to be able to run a condition like:

$sql='select * from tbl_name return first 256 characters';

I know that's not a real query - but there's got to be a way to get mysql only return the first ### (some arbitrary number that the user can specify) characters of a result, for each field, in eac row returned.

Any ideas?

Ideally, if i could do something like test for a returned result > 256 characters, and render a link like:

<a href='page.php?show_all=true'>Data larger than 256 Characters - Click Here to view entire contents</a>

...instead of doing a strlen<### in php would be just neato; ie., i'd like to avoid making my server/php run the check, and just have mysql return 256 characters TO PHP. Or something...

TIA,

-Paul.

[Anon]

You want to get the first 256 bytes of the image?? I don't get it...first you're talking about images and then about characters. Anyway, just in case you didn't know, you can't just get the first 256bytes of the image and display those 256bytes as an image - it won't show.

But if you want to get the first 256 chars of a string, use the substring() function:

SELECT SUBSTRING(fieldName FROM 0 FOR 256) FROM tblName;

Diego