Making a simple news feed for my site in PHP

[Rikki]

I was wondering how to read a certain amount of characters from a string and display only the first 20 of them but removing any half words at the end of the string.

Eg:

mainstring ="Hello and welcome to yet another script"

should make :

choppedstring = "Hello and welcome to"

If it landed on half a word at the end if would backtrack and remove it from the new string :

oldstring = "Hello and welcome to y"
newstring = "Hello and welcome to"

I know Im not explaining myself very well but hopefully the examples will help show what I mean

Thanks

[notepad_coder]

If you want it to only show whole words then you could try this:

<?
$string = "Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah.";
$words = explode(" ", $string);
for ($i = 0; $i <= 5; $i++) {
  echo $words[$i]. " ";
}
?>

The only way I know how to do it so it will only show the first 20 charaters is to use if statements for it like

<?
$string = "Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah.";
for ($i = 0; $i <= 20; $i++) {
  if ($string[20] == " ") {
    echo $string[19];
  } else {
    echo $string[$i];
  }
}
?>

But that doesn't really work well cause you would have to have it find the word right before the cutopff word.

[Rikki]

Thanks, is there a command similar to STRCOPY where I can copy so many chars from a string into another string?

[Chris82]

You could use:

<?php
$old = 'thirty and many many more characters, too many to count';
$new = substr($old, 0, 20);

echo $new;
?>

That takes the first twenty characters of the old string and stores it in the variable $new.

[seanf]

If you are storing the news in a MySQL database you can select the number of words you want returned in your query:

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(field, ' ', 20) as newstext from table;

Just change 20 to how many words you want and they will be returned in "newstext"

Sean

[Rikki]

Originally posted by seanf
If you are storing the news in a MySQL database you can select the number of words you want returned in your query:

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(field, ' ', 20) as newstext from table;

Just change 20 to how many words you want and they will be returned in "newstext"

Sean

nice one!

I'll have a go at that