Making an article into a paged article

[turoati]

I have two questions, one more theoretical and one more practical.

1. Suppose I have a database that contains a number of large (3-10 page) magazine articles. Currently I have code that displays the articles as one long page, but I'd like to change that so the articles are displayed with something like 200 words per page. Whats the best way to go about doing this? Should I just make each article a giant string and display it 200 words at a time? That seems a little absurd but I can't think of a better way without remaking a large database.

2. In actuality I have a database with a number of large articles, but the articles are not saved as a single entry into the databse. The articles are broken up into sections corresponding to where graphics are inserted, with each section being a different cell in the db table. For example:

Section 1 [ text text ]
..............[ text text ]

..............[ text text ]

Section 2 [A JPEG]

Section 3[ text text ]
..............[ text text ]
..............[ text text ]
..............[ text text ]

Since the size of the text sections aren't uniform I can't just display a section per page. Any ideas?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[bpat1434]

How about just using substr() and if you're on page one, start at 0, page 2: 201, page 3: 401, etc.

Then, just check to see if the last item is a broken word (i.e. "Today was the fir"), or image tag (i.e. "<img src="http://www.som""). If it is, fix it with substr() by either adding, or deleting characters and modifying the start position of the next "page".

~Brett

[turoati]

Well thats what I was thinking, and I guess thats the only real solution.

I would think the easiest way in general would be to store each page seperately in the db and just query it to return page x when the user is viewing that page. Unfortunately Im working with code thats already written and the pagination thing has to work retroactively.