Display X Characters

[jason97673]

Hello,

 

I am trying to retrieve data in my PHP page. I can do that successfully, however I would like to retrieve perhaps the first 75 characters of the result set.

 

For example I am making a website that on the front page has the latest news etc. Well right below the latest news I have a <DIV> and it is relatively positioned so I need to make sure the short descriptions of these news excerpts don't end up overlapping my DIV.

 

Should be rather simple as I am sure there is a simple keyword for it somewhere.

 

Any help appreciated.

[obsidian]

Check out the substr() function.

[jason97673]

Sounds like a PHP Function? Would I then solve the problem in my PHP or in the SQL?

[cmgmyr]

that is a php function

[jason97673]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I checked out http://us2.php.net/substr

 

But being that I have

$data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM info where front_page='1'")
or die(mysql_error());//Display Error message

echo '<table id="news_table">';
echo '<tr>';
echo  '<td><b>Latest News and Announcements</b></td>';
echo '</tr>';

while ($info=mysql_fetch_array( $data ))
{
echo '<tr>';
echo  '<td><a href="showarticle.php?article_id=' .$info['article_id'] .'">' .$info['title'] .'</a></td>';
echo '</tr>';
echo '<tr>';
echo  '<td class="text2">Date Published: <b>' .$info['created'] .'</b></td>';
echo '<tr>';
echo  '<td colspan="2">' .$info['short'] .'</td>';
echo '</tr>';
echo '<tr>';
echo  '<td><hr /></td>';
echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table>';

 

I'm not very sure how substr() would fit into that very well.

[effigy]

MySQL's SUBSTR.

[bubblegum.anarchy]

As effigy stated.

 

SELECT substr(value, 0, 75) AS value_trim FROM table