Setting a set number of characters for a variable?

[Perad]

I am calling a load of infomration from my database, unfortunately there is not much room on the page to display the whole article, instead i plan to limit the result to set amount of characters and add a link to read the whole thing..

 

How do i do this?

 

The variable is called $blog_content

[Orio]

<?php

$length = 10; //Show 10 first chars
$blog_content = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

echo substr($blog_content, 0, $length)."... Read more!";

/*
Output-
abcdefghij... Read more!
*/

?>

 

 

Orio.