MySQL select first paragraph

[seanmayhew]

I have a story lead on my front page that I just want to display the author name and the first paragraph of that authors most recent story. Should I just create a field in my database that contains the lead. Or is there a way to select just the first paragraph of the article.

[Chris82]

You can use mysql substring(text, start, end) if you know how many characters to extract.

SELECT Substring(articletext, 0, 20) AS abstract FROM yourtable 
WHERE authorid = 1
ORDER BY publisheddate
LIMIT 1;

You can also use PHPs function substr() and strpos() in connection to get the first paragraph.

Example:

$text  = '<p>blasdasdasdsad</p><p>asdsad</p>';

echo substr($text, 0, strpos('</p>', text)); 

Maybe you have to add the length of the search word (here </p>) to the number returned by strpos.

Christian