Changing variable length?, only want 15 characters of full desc into variable

[luke777]

Hi there

 

I'm new to php, still learning and I got stuck with this... I'd really appreciate any help, i've searched everywhere but without any success.

 

What I am doing is grabbing some table data and for each putting it into html code to display a list of games from the database

 

<?

$sql = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM `games` WHERE `authorsite`="yippigames" ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0, 3') or mysql_error();

 

while($row=mysql_fetch_array($sql)) {

                $rowname = $row["name"];

                $change = str_replace( " ", "-", $rowname);

 

                echo("<table class='gltable' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0'><tr><td><a href='/game/".$row["id"]."/$change.html' rel='nofollow' class='gamelink'><img src='http://www.mysite.net/img/own/".$row["nameid"].".jpg' alt='".$row["name"]."' width='100' height='100' class='gamethumb' align='left' /></a><a href='/game/".$row["id"]."/$change.html' rel='nofollow' class='gamelink'>".$row["name"]."</a><br /><span class='gdesc'>".$row["desc"]."...</span></td></tr></table> \n");}

 

?>

 

 

Everything is displaying great, but my only problem is I only want 20 characters of the description to display otherwise theres too much text on the page for each game.

 

I just really need to make the ".$row["desc"]." in the code display just half of the full description.

 

Any ideas  ???

 

Any help is much appreciated!

 

Thanks Luke.

[taquitosensei]

This should work

$sql = mysql_query('SELECT *,substr(desc,20) as desc FROM `games` WHERE `authorsite`="yippigames" ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0, 3') or mysql_error();

[revraz]

substr

 

http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/func_string_substr.asp

[luke777]

thanks guys, taquitosensei your code didnt work but i managed to play around with it a little and get it working another way

 

You guys are great thank you very much