Ok - the first field is either some direct text, i.e. something in quotes OR the name of the database field you want to take the info from. To fetch the first three paragraphs from a text document saved with \n as line breaks (may be \r\n on other system) where a double break denotes a paragraph in a table called texttest with a text field called body you'd use this:
SELECT
SUBSTRING_INDEX(body, "\n\n", 3)
FROM texttest;
To get the LAST three paragraphs you'd use this
SELECT
SUBSTRING_INDEX(body, "\n\n", -3)
FROM texttest;
As it can take a negative index. Your problem will be deciding how many paragraphs you're going to display per page if you're doing some form of pagination and want to display X paragraphs per page. Then for each page you'd have to do something like this (broken up for easier reading)
SELECT
SUBSTRING_INDEX(
SUBSTRING_INDEX(body, "\n\n", $X * $page)
, "\n\n", -$X)
FROM texttest
Reading forward to get everything up to the page you wanted, then just sucking off the last X paragraphs.
In your system there may be linebreaks between the the <br> tags, so you may have to use "<br>\n<br>" as your search, or even "<br />\r\n<br />" if it's XHTML and your system is using \r\n for line breaks, but you'll soon suss out what works.
