"Philip J. Newman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message 007a01c19fbe$2fbfb4e0$0401a8c0@philip">news:007a01c19fbe$2fbfb4e0$0401a8c0@philip... > Would like to know if there is away that I can only print out the 1st 100 charactors that are pulled from a mySql Database, anyone help? > > Philip J. Newman > Philip's Domain - Internet Project. > http://www.philipsdomain.com/ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Phone: +64 25 6144012
Two ways: 1. SELECT LEFT(fieldname, 100) .... FROM table ... [see: http://www.mysql.com/doc/S/t/String_functions.html ] This will make MySQL return only the first 100 characters from your table. It SHOULD be safe in instances where there are less than 100 characters as well (it'll return the entire string in that case) This is the faster approach as the work is done in MySQL, and only 100 bytes of data are actually sent to your application (as opposed to the entire field). It has some limitations, however. 2. $shortened_string = substr($string, 0, 100); [see: http://www.php.net/substr/ ] Be warned that if $string contains HTML escapes, entities will count as multiple character, e.g. & is 5 characters and thus may be cut in half if it occurs towards the end of your 100 characters. See http://www.php.net/get_html_translation_table for a possible solution to this problem, or store your data in plaintext (this is impossible if you need to store HTML formatting in your text). I use this function to trim long names on my message boards at http://venura.net/ . Mind you, it will not properly handle _all_ HTML escapes, but it does the job well enough. // strLimit($string, $length) // Limits string lengths. If a string is shorter than length, returns that string. If the string is longer than length, returns the first // (length-3) characters of the string, plus a '...' to show continuation. Use: lists. // Modified to appropriately handle html-escapes function strLimit($string, $length) { $length += (4 * substr_count($string, "&")); // comment out this line if you aren't dealing with HTML escapes if(strlen($string) <= $length) return $string; else return substr($string, 0, $length - 3) . "..."; } One possible trick you can do in order to boost performance (by not transferring the entire string from the entire database, but still being able to know whether it's too long) is combine both #1 and #2 and actually pull the first 150-200 characters from the database, which should be enough to deal with most HTML escapes without dumping the entire table. -- Daniel Grace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
