allowing so many characters viewed

[abbey]

i was wondering how do i allowing so many characters in a line. for instance i want to display a title but i only want say 20 characters to show and after the 20th character you see something like this "..." minus the quotes?

i've seen some sites do this but i was wondering how would i go about doing this myself.

thanks for all the help

[Bunkermaster]

The obvious answer would be :
string substr ( string string, int start [, int length])
but it's a bit rude to cut words out so what I do is :

$sql = "SELECT CONCAT(SUBSTRING_INDEX(blah.text, ' ', 5),'...') as blahtext FROM blah";

This will return the 5 first words and add "..." to the end.

[abbey]

will this work if i have my titles stored in a mysql database? because i've never run into that CONCAT code before, but let me try it.

thanks mate.