Dwayne Heronimo wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I am very new to programming. I want to make a preview text that would
> display only a part of the text that is a text field in a database.
>
> //Begin Make preview string
>
> $minitxt = $row_show_cat['text'];
> $len = strlen($minitxt);
>
> if ($len > 235)
> {
> $len = 235;
> }
> else
> {
> $len = $len;
> }
>
> $newstring = substr($minitxt,0,$len);
>
> $previewtext = $newstring;
>
> //End Make preview string
>
> But if I want to display this somewhere in the page it will only display the
> first record of at every text column row <?php echo $previewstext ?>
>
> Althought I am very new to php and programming. I thought maybe I should
> rewrite it into a function. But my function won't work.
>
>
> function previewString($showcatvar) {
>
> $minitxt = $showcatvar;
> $len = strlen($minitxt);
>
> if ($len > 235)
> {
> $len = 235;
> }
> else
> {
> $len = $len;
> }
>
> $newstring = substr($minitxt,0,$len);
>
> $previewtext = $newstring;
the above variable assignment is superfluous.
>
> $previewtext = $whowcatvar;
the above variable assignment is very wrong
(unless you intend to set $previewtext to NULL right after
you have just done the 'hard' work of creaating it).
>
you have no return statement in your function so it will never give you
a value - some other languages implicitly return the value of the last
expression
in a function (e.g. Ruby IIRC) but php requires that you explicitly
use 'return' to pass a variable back to the code that called the function.
note also that the variable named inside the function have nothing to do with
variables named outside the function - this is called variable scope ...
you can reference a variable in the global scope (i.e. one defined in
the outer most level of code by using the 'global' keyword), an example
<?php
function myFunc() {
global $foo;
$bar = "boohoo :-(";
echo " ...INSIDE: ", $foo, " ", $bar;
}
$foo = "tada!";
$bar = "haha!";
myFunc();
echo " ...OUTSIDE: ", $foo, " ", $bar;
?>
> }
have a look at this:
function previewString($showcatvar)
{
// sanity check on the input
if (empty($showcatvar) || !is_string($showcatvar))
return "";
// get the string size
$len = strlen($showcatvar);
// long strings will be truncated to 235 chars
// BTW - this will really bite you in the ass if
// the string contains HTML (think about unclosed tags!)
if ($len > 235)
return substr($showcatvar, 0, 235);
// strings less than or equal to 235 in length
// are shown as is
return $showcatvar;
}
>
>
> and to display it in the page:
>
> <?php echo previewString($row_show_cat['text']) ?>
>
> IT displays notthing. But I think I am doing somthing wrong. I am assigning
> the wrong variables to the $row_show_cat['text']) ???
>
> Please let me know
>
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