[SOLVED] Displaying only a summary...

[tejama]

So far phpfreaks is 3 for 3 on solving my problems, so here we go again, hopefully its 4 for 4.

 

I want to pull some info from a mysql DB and what I'm looking to do is to display only a snippet of text from a text field (ie: the first 30 words of the text entry).  Can anyone suggest how I might go about doing this?

 

Thanks in advance.

[hackerkts]

Try looking for substr().

[suzzane2020]

ya its gonna be

substr($str,0,no of letters)

[DeathStar]

what about:

mysql limit ??

[suzzane2020]

wud that be possible for a particular text?

I guess mysql limit is for the number of records retrieved

[DeathStar]

Maybe this is vb but isnt there a limit command that only retrieves first few letters?

[suzzane2020]

hmm..i dont think there is a limit function for the number of letters in a string..in php..havent come across one

its generaly used for the  number records in a database

[The Little Guy]

http://snippets.tzfiles.com/snippet.php?id=15

[Barand]

try

<?php
$text = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nulla lacinia justo at velit. Nunc porttitor nisl porta mi. Curabitur sollicitudin purus vel felis. Maecenas nunc. Nulla facilisi. Integer vel ante sit amet ipsum consequat facilisis. Suspendisse hendrerit urna vel erat. Quisque auctor, erat nec ullamcorper sollicitudin, wisi leo hendrerit nisl, eu auctor turpis justo quis justo. Proin arcu metus, commodo quis, tincidunt varius, fermentum eget, lectus. Ut tellus. Sed nec dolor. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Nam sed magna.";

$first30 = join (' ', array_slice (explode(' ', $text), 0, 30));

echo $first30;    
?>

[Barand]

Although this probably more efficient

 

<?php
$k = $i = 0;
$first30 = '';

while ($k < 30) {
    $c = $text{$i++};
    $first30 .= $c;
    if ($c == ' ') $k++;
}
echo $first30;
?>

[grimmier]

couldn't you just explode the string with spaces as the seperator, and just output the first 30 elements of the array?

[tejama]

Thanks to all who helped.  I looked at using 'limit', but didn't have much success.  Substr however did the job and I achieved what I was hoping for.

 

PHPFreaks is 4 for 4!

[Barand]

couldn't you just explode the string with spaces as the seperator, and just output the first 30 elements of the array?

 

As in my first example?

[dlkinsey85]

I see that this thread is solved but I'm a fan of the substr_replace() function.   

 

$example = "This line has more than 20 characters"

 

echo substr_replace($example, "...", 20);  would print:

 

This line has more t...

 

you can place the 3 periods with anything you want or leave it blank, " ", and use how ever many characters you want to display.  Its a pretty useful function.