Breaking a long string into smaller prts

[godcity108]

I'm having the following problem and i can't seem to think of a way to EASILY do accomplish this without resorting to potentially server-intensive solutions. Basically, i want to take a string (say, an article from a database around 5000 words long) and break that up into chunks of 1000 words a piece so that the article will be spread out across mupltiple pages. the user can then click from page 1 to page 3 with relative ease.

i've thought about breaking the string up into an array but how much overhead will this cause on the server in terms of processing power and time...? and is there a more efficient way to handle things? session variables, arrays, pipes, etc???

how do bigger article-based sites (like this one) handle this problem?

thanks!
george.

[techek]

I'd think that multiple-page articles would actually be stored in multiple page-records and then be "grouped" (not using GROUP BY) by an article-record. But that's just an "idea". grin

What you could do would be to search for what ever sign of new paragraphs you might have in your text and then cut the pages in to pages at those points - perhaps by including 2 or 3 paragraphs at each page?

You could also resort to some (heavier) calculations by finding the 1000th space in your article, cut the text and the search for the 1000th and 2000th space when making the second page. But THAT would suck major ... uhm ... CPU. s

To say this short : Divide your page into page-records and join the using an article-record. Let me know what you come up with - I might learn something useful too. s