Select

[Manat]

Hi,

How do I select a field from a table, when that filed has many characters but I only want a certain amount.

Suppose for a product table, I want the product description but only a portion of it, like 80characters max?

Thank
MK

[tommynanda]

Although this is not a true solution this is wat strikes my mind rite off ... substr()

[TheDefender]

An application of substr() (combined with strlen() to not truncate the value if it is not greater than 80 chars) would be something like:

$testtext = "This is a bunch of test text.  I am just fillling space, so I can ensure my value goes over 80.  The way this would work with the IF/THEN would be if it is over 80, it truncates the output, and appends a '...' to the end, but if it is less than 80, it just leaves it alone, and outputs it.";
IF(strlen($testtext) > 80) $testtext = substr($testtext, 0,80)."...";
echo $testtext."<br />";

$testtext = "This is a small amount of text to show how it won't get appended.";
IF(strlen($testtext) > 80) $testtext = substr($testtext, 0,80)."...";
echo $testtext;

tommynanda, just out of curiosity, I am interested in knowing your thoughts when you say "this is not a true solution". I have used it as a "true solution" in the past with no problems... except if my input had HTML in it, in which case, I am stripping it anyhow...

[tommynanda]

tommynanda, just out of curiosity, I am interested in knowing your thoughts when you say "this is not a true solution"

Even though we're cutting it into 80 chars... we are extracting entire data of Products column from DB which can be 2000 chars... We are eating server resources😃 ... I thought there is a better solution that can extract(SELECT) only 80 chars while pulling out from DB