Limitning length of characters returned.

WizyWyg

I have a "news" section on my website, that I only want, say the first 1000 characters to be displayed and the visitor would have to click on a "more" link to get the rest of the article.

I dont know if this is a MySQL query that does it, or it can be limited to PHP.

my table in the DB is called news with news_id, articletitle, article, and date (which is stored as MySQL date format). the main page pulls up the news (currently it diplays the whole article) and links to newsarticle.php passing on the news_id as the parameter to display the correct article ( ie newsarticle.php?news_id=1 )

Any ideas on how to build this?

alanzhao

SELECT SUBSTRING(article, 1, 1000) FROM tbl_news

SELECT MID(article, 1, 1000) FROM tbl_news

or select whole article and use substr()

jimson

To : WizyWyg
you need to know this function to perform your dream. substr().
click on your php manual and read this function, it got example.

WizyWyg

Thanks for the substr() reference.

How would I set up the link however for ...REad More... etc?

jimson

To : WizyWyg
To set up a link for the read more option, it is quite easy.
first you delegate a page, say news_more.php to display a news whenever a $_GET['newsID'] is set
for example;

<?php
if( isset( $_GET['newsID'] ) ) {
	// read the specific news id from the database and show it
	// you need to cast the news id to integer for secure SQL statement.
	$_GET['newsID'] = (int) $_GET['newsID'];
} else {
	// direct the user back to the main page.
}
?>

so, the link of the read more feature will be more or less like this.

<a href="news_more.php?newsID=12">Read More</a>

you just need to loop the newsID number according to what you receive when you loop the recordset from the database. Hopefully you don't need me to code all in order to understand 🙂