Shortening a News Article

dannylee

Hi Guys,

I've developed a news system (very basic really) and i'm displaying the articles on a page. I don't however want the entire text of an article being displayed, and therefore only want say the first 50 words to be displayed.

Below is the query i'm currently using:

mysql_select_db($database_localhost, $localhost);
$query_rsNews = "SELECT id, headline, articleBody, image, dateAdded FROM news";
$query_limit_rsNews = sprintf("%s LIMIT %d, %d", $query_rsNews, $startRow_rsNews, $maxRows_rsNews);
$rsNews = mysql_query($query_limit_rsNews, $localhost) or die(mysql_error());
$row_rsNews = mysql_fetch_assoc($rsNews);

The row in question is articleBody.

Could someone please help to modify this query so that it only displays x number of words.

Thanks for any help anyone can give

Danny

pete_bisby

$query_rsNews = "SELECT id, headline, IF(LENGTH(articleBody)<50,articleBody, CONCAT(SUBSTR(articleBody,1,50),'...')) AS 'articleBody50', image, dateAdded FROM news";

This should display the whole article if it is less than 50 characters, else display the first 50 characters with a few full-stops added to the end.

bpat1434

Removed...

If you want to use XX words, you'd be better of splitting it into an array, and then concatenating them to XX words length.

Something like:

$string = 'This is just a short string with quite a few words of some weird length like 123-different letters or something like that.  But what about hyphenated-words or words that no one spells right?';

// Make string an array:
$words = explode(" ", $string);

$out = '';
for($i=0; $i<50; $i++)
{
  $out .= $words[$i];
}

echo $out . ' ...';

Hope that helps.

pete_bisby

OK, my bag - I did 50 characters instead of 50 words. What you can do, however, is this:

$query_rsNews = "SELECT id, headline, SUBSTRING_INDEX(articleBody, ' ', 51) AS 'articleBody50', image, dateAdded FROM news";

This will read upto the 51st space (which should be 50 words), and ignore the rest. If you let MySQL processing do database work, which what it is designed to do, it'll leave the PHP processing to do what it needs to do - no need to create a loop when it isn't necessary.

[ Mod Edit - bpat1434 ] - Removed part of the conversation that was inconsequential to the answer.

bpat1434

My comment was removed by myself because I hadn't noticed the first post. For whatever reason, it automatically scrolled to your post. And I had fixed a few things, then realized that yours wasn't the first post. So then I went back and changed it.

Woops... wrong window...

Ah ha!! I didn't know you could do it in MySQL with SUBSTRING_INDEX. Learn something new every day...