How to get first x characters of string

[jesus_hairdo]

I have a script which retrieves info from a mysql database, then displays this in a table.

The problem that i have is that one of the fields is very long, (some entries have a length of 80-90 characters).

What i would like to do is to strip this down so it only displays the first say 40 characters of the string.

I suppose i could do a
for($i=0;$i <40; $i++)
{
print $string[$i];
}
but considering there are 300+ records i don't want to do this if at all possible.

Any suggestions??

cheers

Jamie

[jesus_hairdo]

I found my own answer, (i guess reading the on-line documentation at www.php.net is a good idea after all 😉)

string substr ( string string, int start [, int length])