Cutting the text short...

[evie001001]

I am new to PHP to please bear with me!

 

I am displaying information from my database (bindings) on my page... in the form of text. Is there anyway I could cut the text short to display only a few characters? For example, i'd like the job descriptions in this page: http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~emoore/jobs.php to be cut short so that a user can click 'more' and navigate to a separate page with full descriptions.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks

 

Evie

[bradkenyon]

http://www.php.net/substr

 

substr($text, 0, 32);

 

$text is the string you want to cut, then 0 is the starting point, 0 being the beginning, then 32 being the 32nd character in the string.

[craygo]

use substr()

 

$text = substr($databasefield, 0, 100);

 

change 100 to the number of characters you would like to display

 

Ray

[richardw]

here is one more solution, its an old one of mine and code heavy but it gives flexibility to trim where you want and set a trimming spread before the break

 

<?php                   
$posttext = "Soon you will know just how easy it is to build unncessaarily long routines. Take a look at counting words and seperating at a space or a period. This routine works well based on the trimto length";
		$str_len = strlen($posttext);
		if ($str_len >= 75) {
		$str_len = trim(strlen($posttext));
		$trimto = 65; 
		$select = 8;  // eight characters either way to a break
		 $i = 0;
	      for ($i = 0; $i < $trimto+$select; $i++) {
		   $current_char = substr($posttext,$i,1);
			if ($current_char == " " ) {
				$cutlength = $i;
				} 
	  }
   $textout = (substr($posttext, $str_len= 0, $cutlength));
}
 echo $textout; 
?>