Using only Part of a string

[tobeyt23]

Pulling data from old DB to new DB. One field is text for an article, I need to pull it and only get part of it for a new summary field. How can I get just part, say 1 or 2 paragraphs out of the string?

 

Thanks

[hostfreak]

http://php.net/substr

 

Edit- Unless of course you just want to do it with MySQL... im not sure about that

 

Edit- NVM I remember, in MySQL you can use the LEFT function (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_left)

[tobeyt23]

Not exactly what I was looking for, would more like to break it on a sentence or paragraph end.

[GingerRobot]

explode?

[tobeyt23]

Still not what I am looking for

[thryb]

search your string for a "." (for sentence or the 10th "." depend on how many you want) and count the char before then substr it. that would be my idea

 

n00bie idea

[tobeyt23]

What if the sentence doesn't end with '.'?

[tobeyt23]

I have done the above with substr, however it breaks sentences up and I am not looking for that. Would like to just grab first 4-5 sentences. The might end with "." or not. Any more suggestions?

[GingerRobot]

Well, if you mean that a sentence could end with a ?/!/. then i would suggest you have two options. 1.) Regular expressions. 2.) Cycle through the string character by character and break it apart where necessary. Since regular expressions are annoying me at the moment:

 

<?php
$str = "Hello! Is anybody out there? Obviously not. I'm all alone";
$i=0;
$z = 0;
$sentences = array();
while($i<strlen($str)){
	$sentences[$z] .= $str[$i];
	if($str[$i] == '!' || $strlen[$i] == '.' || $strlen[$i] == '?'){
	$z++;
}
$i++;
}
print_r($sentences);
?>

 

If thats not the issue, then im not sure how you would tell where a sentence ends.

[tobeyt23]

This what I ended up doing:

 

<?php
$str = "This is a sentence. This is a question? This is some excitment!";
$sentences = preg_split("/[.!?]/", $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
echo substr($str, 0, $sentences[1][1]);
?>