shorted a blob

[gabemcmillan]

I have a blob variable that I would like to shorten to just the first 30 chars or so. Does anyone know of a function or method which I could do that? I can't find it. 🙂

Thanks,
Gabe

[Drakla]

Do you just want to fetch the first 30 chars, actually change the field type to something like char(30), or still have it as a blob field but clip all current entries to 30 characters?

UPDATE blobtable SET blobfield = LEFT(blobfield, 30);

or

ALTER TABLE blobtable change blobfield blobfield char(30);

or

SELECT LEFT(blobfield, 30) FROM blobtable;

[gabemcmillan]

I just want to fetch the first 30 chars in the blob to echo out on a page. 🙂

[Drakla]

That'll be example 3, then.

[TobyRT]

If you want to pull the full text through using the SQL query for later use, you can also restrict it in the echo command using the substr() function - the 0,200 represents where to start the echo and where to end it (100,200) would give you characters 100-200, of course you'd be wanting to use (0,30)

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo substr($row['article'], 0, 200); 
}