display first 500 characters

brauchi

FIrst of all, the answer could be here on theboards but I don't know what I should call this.

I made a search for our website. I would like the search query to look through my articles. But I only want to display the first 500 characters.

The following code would put everything into the variable beginning.

$nQuery = "select * from tbl_ArticlePages where or apContent like '%$Query%'";

$nResult = mysql_query($nQuery);

while($nRow = mysql_fetch_array($nResult))
{
$beginning[ = $nRow["apContent"];
}

The variable beginning should have the first 500 characters of the article in it.

How would I do this?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you

AstroTeg

Check out [man]substr[/man].

darthmahon

Found this great function that actually selects as many characters as you want, then cuts it appropriately - i.e not in the middle of a word! Here it is:

function caption_cutter($haystack, $needle, $len)
{
	$output        = "";
	$strlen        = strlen($haystack);

for($i = 0; $i < $strlen; $i++)
{
	$char_num    = $len + $i;
	$new_str    = substr($haystack, 0, $char_num);
	$last_char    = substr($new_str, -1);

	if($last_char == $needle)
	{
		$output    = $new_str;
		break;
	}
}

if($output == "")
{
	$output    = $haystack;
}

return $output;
}

Call the function as so:

$nQuery = "select * from tbl_ArticlePages where or apContent like '%$Query%'";

$nResult = mysql_query($nQuery);

while($nRow = mysql_fetch_array($nResult))
{

// cut text
// 500 refers to the amount of characters
// " " refers to the item to cut at i.e a space currently, could be "-" so it cuts at the nearest hyphen
$smaller_text = caption_cutter($nRow["apContent"], " ", 500);

echo $smaller_text."...";

}

Hope it helps.

Cheers,
Chris

brauchi

Thank you so much. It worked fine except for one litle problem.

When the search finds 5 articles than the first 500 characters of the first search result will be returnd. So I have 5 times the beginning of the first article.

I will keep trying to figure out what went wrong.