Limiting MySQL results

[insomniac]

Hi,

I'm looking for a way to shorten my MySQL results, to a certain number of characters for each result taken from the database.

ie:
I need
"I was raised by rabid wolves in an eskimo on the outskirts of france"

shorted to:
"I was raised by rabid wolves in an es..."

Is there a quick way to do this kind of thing using MySQL and PHP3?

[Karl]

Try something like this in your query
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code/font><HR><pre>
SELECT substring(FIELD, 1, LENGTH) FROM tableName
[/code]

Where field is the field which stores the data you want to trim and length is the lenght you want returning.

OR
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code/font><HR><pre>
SELECT substring(FIELD, 1, round(char_length(FIELD) * 0.10) ) FROM tableName
[/code]

This would return 10% of the data from the cell called FIELD.

Hope these help you.

------------------
Karl Austin
KDA Web Services

[insomniac]

Thanks a heap for the code Karl..cant say it helped that much. If you can see something wrong with this code...let me know:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code/font><HR><pre>$shortbio = mysql_query("SELECT substring($biography, 1, 100) FROM artist WHERE artist_id='$id'",$db);[/code]

The thing i'm trying to do is grab a band biography from the database, and shorten it down to save space. I use
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code/font><HR><pre>&lt;?php printf("%s \n", mysql_result($shortbio,0,"biography")); ?&gt;[/code]
to try and print the shortent bio to the page, but that doesn't seem to be working. I must be doing something not quite right...or completetly wrong. One of the two

[This message has been edited by insomniac (edited May 21, 2000).]

[Karl]

Try this:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code/font><HR><pre>
$sql = "SELECT substring(biography, 1, 100) FROM artist WHERE artist_id='$id'";
$res = mysql_query($sql, $db);

$bio = mysql_fetch_row($res); $bio = $bio['0'];
[/code]

This code should work for you. $bio will store the short biography for you.

------------------
Karl Austin
KDA Web Services

[insomniac]

Thanks again karl...everything works really well now. I've been going through various PHP3 and MySQL source code for about 5 hours now

I think I need some more coffee.