truncating a variable

[Joan_Collins]

Hi,

This is something I'm having a lot of trouble with - I have a variable drawn out of mySQL that's basically full of text.

I want to grab a portion of it for a search page - under the title, I want the first say, ten or so words out of the string - it's not an array though (I think I could figure out how to do it if it was).

Grabbing the first thirty or so characters would also be helpful to know.

Thanks for any help in advance...

[jburfield]

I would suggest you do this with your SQL rather than with PHP. However, you can do either.

With MySQL, do something like this in your query:

$query = "SELECT substring(FIELD, 0, 30) ...";

That will give you the first 30 characters from the field.

You can also do this:

$query = "SELECT substring_index(FIELD, " ", 10) ...";

That will give you the first 10 words. (using the ' ' (space) as the delimter.)

If you were to do it in PHP, you could pull the field from the database and then do something like this:

$field = mysql_result($result, 0); / get the field /

$file = substr($field, 0, 30);

That would also give you the first 30 characters of the item.

Hope this helps.

-- Jason

[jburfield]

$field = mysql_result($result, 0); / get the field /

$file = substr($field, 0, 30);

That should have been:

$field = substr($field, 0, 30);

Sorry...bad typing.

-- Jason