Newbie question: select a single record by id

generic

I'm trying to figure out (probably super simple, but...) how to select the single most recent record from the database, by id I guess would be easiest. The idea is that I have a fairly simple news posting type of setup happening so it selects and displays all records in descending order by id:

$query = " SELECT date, bandname, description FROM $tablename WHERE month='$month' ORDER BY id desc";

But I need to set up a single headline as in 'Featured Artist' on the front page, so 'ORDER BY id desc' is irrelevant to the code. I simply need something like ORDER BY gimme one damn record 😃

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.

-gen

leatherback

I am not sure what you are trying to get, but I suppose you are looking for the option "limit"
Something like:

$query = " SELECT date, bandname, description FROM $tablename WHERE month='$month' ORDER BY id desc limit 0 1";

generic

Thanks, it's exactly what I needed.

Can Limit also be used to limit the amount of data displayed? For example, if the description column has a value with 500 characters (a full story), can I use limit to pull only, say, the first 25 characters from the description column to display a shortened version of the full story?

-gen

leatherback

I am not sure about limit. Don't think so. But you can grab a substring from the the text in the database:

substr($string,"from","to")
substr($string, 0,)

http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.substr.php

generic

Thanks again! That helped immensely!

Cheers!

-gen