Reading first few lines

Anon

I have a table in the database that has a text field and has entries that may be 2 or 3 paragraphs long. Is is possible to create a page that will read that field but will only print the first x number of characters/lines/words to be used as a preview?

Anon

Yes. Try the substr function: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php

Anon

Thank you, I looked at it, but...
I don't really know how to do.
I'm really sorry, could you give
me another hint, please?

Thank you so much!!

Julia

Anon

Say your text is in the variable $text. You want say the first 200 characters of $text... you do:

$summary = substr($text, 0, 200);

amcgrath

OK, Julia, this is only because, well, your name is Julia 😉

say $whole_story is the entire text in the database and you want to only show say the first 10 characters, then

$lngth = 10;
$summary = substr($whole_story,0,$lngth);

Now $summary is what you can display. You could also use explode() the $whole_story delimited on a period to give you (potentially) the first sentence (unless things like Dr. Mr. etc are in the first sentence, or it ends with a ? or ! but you can incorporate that as well.

Anon

Julia,

My best suggestion is to use mysql internal string functions - I think that it'll work quicker then php substr().

Let's say your field that contains an article is [article] in writngs table, and you want to retrieve first 150 characters or a particular article, then

$sql="select left(article, 150) as review from writings";
$result=mysql_query($sql, $conn);
$res=mysql_fetch_array($result);

echo "$res[review]";