Another PHP Question

teammatt3 posted this at 23:58 — 26th November 2005.

Joined: Sep 2003

I have a field in a form called description. Description can be 1000 characters long.

I have a short description page that lists all the listings with some little details. I want this page to have the description but only 100 characters of it. Can you help me out here?

In my language it would look something like this

<?
echo '{DESCRIPTION}' display '100' characters
?>

Renegade posted this at 00:40 — 27th November 2005.

He has: 3,022 posts

Joined: Oct 2002

Try something like this:

<?php
if(strlen($_POST['description']) > 100) {
    $text = substr($_POST['description'], 0, 100);
  }
else {
    $text = $_POST['description'];
  }
?>

Greg K posted this at 04:01 — 27th November 2005.

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

If you are not needing the full description on the page at all (ie. you click a link to go to full details on another page) then I would recommend only retrieiving partial info from the database to begin with.
SELECT id,LEFT(description,100) AS shortdesc FROM tablename'
(see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/string-functions.html)

Then assuming you get the results back into an array called row then you would have row['id'] and row['shortdesc']

This reduces the amount of information being returned from teh DB server back to PHP. If you have most fields over 100 characters, this will reduce your overhead.

-Greg

teammatt3 posted this at 15:53 — 27th November 2005.

He has: 2,102 posts

Joined: Sep 2003

Thanks you guys. I am using Renegade's just because it works without too many modifications. I am guessing I have to do something in MySQL with yours Greg.

Thanks