how to truncate text from database

[manny]

i have like a news-kind-a site with full text articles entered into my database. i wanted to display just the first paragraph of the article and put in a link to a page where the rest of the text is.
how do i do this?
thanks so much for your help.

[herve]

Hi,

do you want to do that at MySQL level ou at PHP level ?

Hervé.

[manny]

php level i suppose. but if you could show me how to do that in both levels, i'd greatly appreciate it.
thanks, herve.

[jesus_hairdo]

How would the end of the first paragraph be marked ??

if it was by a <br> then just do

$article = explode("<BR>", $text);
$first_paragraph = $article[0];

if the paragraph is defined as being of a certain length then you can use the substr() function.
So if it was the first 50 characters you would do

$first_paragraph = substr($article, 0,50);

To do a similar substring with mysql you could use

$sql = "select SUBSTRING_INDEX(field, ' ', 50) FROM tablename"; //this would return the 1st 50 words from the field

[manny]

thanks a lot jesus_hairdo.

[maestrosdelweb]

Hi and thanks for the explode part. It help me build my new very useful function:

function parrafin($string) {
$article = explode("\n", $string);
$parrafo = $article[0];
 return( $parrafo ); 
 }