Get first 5 words from database record

argrafic

Hello,

I want to display the records from a table in the database but i don't want all the info printed on screen because there are columns that have long text, so I wanted to know how can I get the first 5-10 words from the column and print those on screen?

Thanks!

sneakyimp

if you have some sql and are selecting a bunch of data, you can take a substring of the whole string using php's [man]substr[/man] function:

$sql = "select * from myTable";
$res = mysql_query($sql)
  or die('query failed');
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
  echo substr($row['longTextField'], 0, 25); // echoes first 25 chars of the string
}

If you want to do it in sql (which might save memory or something i don't know) then i think this might work:

select substring(longTextField, 1, 25) from myTable

NogDog

You might be able to enhance the SQL version to grab a substring from the beginning to the first space after an arbitrary number of characters, so as not to break in the middle of a word. In this example, "20" is the arbitrary length:

SELECT SUBSTRING(longTextField, 1, LOCATE(' ', longTextField, 20)) FROM myTable

dagon

im mysql you have substring_index ...

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(text, ' ', 5) as fiveWords FROM myTable

NogDog

dagon wrote:
im mysql you have substring_index ...
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(text, ' ', 5) as fiveWords FROM myTable

Even better. 🙂