reducing the size of text from database

[brockie99]

i am pulling text in the form of long news articles off a mysql database, and only have a small area to display them in. the idea is to give a snippit of information on the homepage, and allow the user to click to view the whole article. How can i limit the length of the text i want to display??

$select = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM news WHERE newsID = 16;",$db);
while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($select))
{
printf ("<p class='bold'>%s - %s</p><p>%s</p>", $myrow["description"], $myrow["date"], $myrow["fullnews"]);
}
?>

thanks

[TheDefender]

[man]substr()[/man]