[SOLVED] Article "taster"

[conker87]

I have a site with articles, reviews etc. I have the following code to list the articles:

 

<?php
$query = "SELECT * FROM " ARTICLE_TBL;
$result = mysql_query($query);
$rowcount = mysql_num_rows($result);
echo "Listing $rowcount results.<ul>";
while ($article = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
?>
<li><a href="/i-article:<?=$article['id']; ?>"><b><?=$article['title']; ?></b></a> by <i><?=$article['author']; ?></i>.</li>
<?
  }
  echo "</ul>";
?>

Any articles found will be displayed in a bullet list. This is great, but I'm wanting to show a little example of what the start of the article looks like, say about 50-100 chars? I think rtrim() but that only trims away specific characters from the end.

 

Any ideas?

[bigbob]

Well, not too shure about this but u could make a textBox with 0 border and limit the textbox to 50 or 100 chars.

put your result in a variable like this:

 

$article_body=mysql_numrows($result);

then put the initial value in the text box as "<?php echo $article; ?>";

That should do the trick

[conker87]

Hmm. That would work. I'd rather not have it in a text box really. Just looks really there.

[Dragen]

This code should work for you:

$article_body = substr(strip_tags(VARIABLE WHERE INFO IS STORED), '0', '100');

strip tags will remove any html code, because it can give out very bad results if you cut off halfway through a tag, such as a link.

The 100 is how many characters to show, just change it to what you need.

[conker87]

Yeah, I had a look around the PHP site looking for any functions to use, came across those and made a little function a little different to that. Though yours is a little smaller, so I'll use that.

 

Thanks again!