select only 100 characters from a field

__greg

say i have a table that holds a lot of text. on one of my pages, i only want to display the first 100 words, then a 'click here to read more...' link. how would I do that?

How do i limit the number of characters displayed/selected to a certain number?

Shawn_Jetton

$text = "This is the text that will be longer then 100 char. You will get this from your database fields.";
$displaytext = substr($text, 0, 100);
echo $displaytext;

Now you could get a little more into it and check to see if the last char is a space. If not you do -1 till you hit a space.. This way you will display whole works..

__greg

oh cool that's awesome thank you.... do you know if there is any way to automatically add a '...' at the end?

Shawn_Jetton

$text = "This is the text that will be longer then 100 char. You will get this from your database fields."; 
$displaytext = substr($text, 0, 100)."..."; 
echo $displaytext;

Shawn_Jetton

I was bored so here is the script to back up till if finds a space..

$text = "This is the text that will be longer then 100 char. You will get this from your database fields.";
$displaytext = substr($text, 0, 100);
while(substr($displaytext, strlen($displaytext)-1) != " "){
	$displaytext = substr($displaytext, 0, strlen($displaytext)-1);
}
echo $displaytext."...";

wmhop

Using a query like:

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(fieldName , ' ' , 100 ) FROM tableName

You'll have to check the MySql manual http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/string-functions.html for an explanation of this.
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the other suggestion but it is another option.

cheese

For what it is worth, I use this to pass info to the next page using the More link.

It is used on a soccer site I did for a local club Cornard United

$col1=$row[1]
$col7 = substr($row[6],0,150);
print $col7;
print "....<a href=morenews.php?newsitem=";
print $col1;
print ">More</a>";

My code is rough and ready. Sometimes it even works.

Cheers,

Neil.