Extracting a summary from a text/blob

drgan

I was just migrating my site over to MySQL vs. using a PHP generated "text" db when I realized I may possibly be able to better make a portion of my site now. I might also be able to eliminate an entire page/table from the DB.

What I want to do is extract a set amount of or length of text from an article and use it as a summary. Currently, I have a separate file which contains hand made summaries of these articles.

The only way I currently have in mind is to use a

for ($i = 0; $i < $length_of_string/3); $++)

type of deal. Don't get me wrong, I love my for loops but I'm sure there is a better and more efficient way of performing this task.

Anon

Well, what's your criteria for the summary? One way would be to use substr(), but depending on your needs, you might need more complicated algorithms.

Diego

drgan

I'm taking a full "article" and shrinking it down to about the first five sentances or so.

Anon

You could do strpos() five times, to find the fifth period, and then you use substr() to get the characters until that point.

Diego

reeljustice

We are working on a similar thing, as with the typical "read more" statements/links you see on many of the CMS systems. Wouldn't it be simpler to create a field in your table for your summary, run a "while" loop to get the first 500 or 1000 characters and populate your "summary" field?