help displaying first 10 words in database field

[kaiman]

I have the following script to display a brief news clip/description on the homepage of a website. I am trying to get it to display the first ten words from the 'text' field, but it just seems to ignore it and display the whole news item, no errors or anything...

 

Any ideas what's going on or what I am missing?

 

Thanks,

 

kaiman

 

<?php
// connects to server and selects database.
include ("dbconnect.inc.php");

// table name
$tbl_name="news";

// select info from database
$sql="SELECT * FROM $tbl_name ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1";
$result=mysql_query($sql);

// display news items
while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo "<h1>Latest News</h1>\n";
$row_date = strtotime($row['date']);
echo "<h3>".date('F, j, Y', $row_date)."</h3>\n";


// cut news paragraph to ten words
if (strlen($row['text']) > 10){
$description = substr($row['text'], 0, 10);
}
else{
$description = $row['text'];
}

echo "<p>".$row['text']."... <a href=\"http://www.mysite.com/news/\">Read more</a></p>\n";
}
?>

[mapleleaf]

substr will take the first ten characters not words.

What does the text look like? Formatted??

[kaiman]

SOLVED

 

Thanks for the reply,

 

I actually realized after I posted and re-looked at the PHP substr page that it was based on characters not words, so I just simplified the variable to this and now it works as expected.

 

// cut news to 110 characters and then display
$headline = $row['text'];
echo "<p>".substr($headline, 0, 110)."... <a href=\"http://www.mysite.com/news/\">Read more</a></p>\n";