Restrict the length of a article?

[ATLien]

Ok, I am making a news script. I wanted to put a option in to if the article is more then like 100 characters it will cut it off and add a more... at the end, that is linked to the whole thing. How would I do that? Here is the code for my current news.

			<?PHP
			$query = "SELECT * FROM news";
			$result = mysql_query("Select * from news") or die();
			while ($sqlnews = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
			?>
			<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
			<tr>
				<td><span class="newsdate">~<?PHP echo $sqlnews['date']; ?>~</span></td>
			<tr>
			<tr>
				<td><span class="news"><?PHP echo $sqlnews['news']; ?></span></td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td><hr></td>
			</tr>
			</table>
			<?PHP
			}
			?>

Can anyone explain to me how I would cut it off and put a more... so the news section is not the whole page.

[sidney]

check length of $sqlnews[news] and if to long make shorten it and add link to wholenews.php (which you will have to create to display whole news items)

example of edit below, guessed your table field names

 <?PHP 
            $query = "SELECT * FROM news"; 
            $result = mysql_query("Select * from news") or die(); 
            while ($sqlnews = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { 
            if(strlen($sqlnews['news'])>100)
			{
			$sqlnews['news']==substr($sqlnews['news'],0,100)."<a href=\"wholenews.php?newsid=".$sqlnews['newsid']."\">...more</a>";
			}
			?> 
            <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0> 
            <tr> 
                <td><span class="newsdate">~<?PHP echo $sqlnews['date']; ?>~</span></td> 
            <tr> 
            <tr> 
                <td><span class="news"><?PHP echo $sqlnews['news']; ?></span></td> 
            </tr> 
            <tr> 
                <td><hr></td> 
            </tr> 
            </table> 
            <?PHP 
            } 
            ?>