ARRAY? please advice how to fix.

Anon

Could someone advise me how to get the first sentence from a blob in Mysql?

for example. I entered an essay in a blob called $essay. Now , I need a summary intro for the essay which is likely before the first querstion mark or period.

how do i get $summary that takes only the first sentence out of $essay?

this is how i did:
$summary[] = split ('[.?]', $row[articletext]);

then print $summary[0]

but im only getting 'ARRAY' instead of the sentence.

Anon

$summary[] = split ('[.?]', $row[articletext]);

should read

$summary = split ('[.?]', $row[articletext]);

But I think splitting it PHP side is a mistake. Get MySQL to do it, as I explained in your first post about this problem.

Anon

I put this line:

mysql_query("SELECT LEFT(articletext,LOCATE('.',REPLACE(articletext,'?','.'))) AS Summary FROM articles");

right after I have inserted (Added) the article text or have updated (edited it)

but it didn't work! the summary (Varchar) field remains empty.

how can i fix it?
thanks a bunch!

Anon

What happens if you run that query at the MySQL console? That query works just great on my database.

Anon

I did the command directly on the phpadmin mysql control panel and it worked, but it only selected the sentence but did not add to the summary field?

what should i do?

Anon

also, is there a way to exclude the html tags like <br> ?

the full article has some codes and when the first sentence before a period is selected, the html tags might be incomplete and screw up the whole thing.

OR,
instead of taking a sentence before a period or question mark, is it possible to simply count say 200 characters and show only those characters? again, html tags have to be eliminated. Thanks a lot for your time!@