summary

[trevor]

hi,
ok this is that I am trying to do. I am working on a thing for my site where a user can type an article, and submit it. then on the main page i want it to show the author, date etc., and only the first 100 words or so of their article is shown in the "summary"

anyone know how to pull only 100 words of something from a mysql database "text" field?

thanks,
Trevor

[bdl]

I don't know of a PHP mysql function that will only pull down a certain amount of text or data from a field, you either get the entire field or you don't. The best thing I can think of to do would be to use explode() to change the text into an array, limited to 100 words, then use implode() to turn it back into a string and print the string.

[abc123]

select
  x = cast(realField as char(100))
from
  tblY

didn't test it, and it mgiht give you a warning.. but anyway

[randy]

You could do what PostNuke does. When you go to post an article you get two boxes. One for summary text and one for extended text.

They can enter the first paragraph in the summary and rest in extended. That way you are pulling the summary from one field without trying to do a word or character count and you can just display both fields when someone wants to read the whole article.

[bdl]

Originally posted by randy
You could do what PostNuke does. When you go to post an article you get two boxes. One for summary text and one for extended text.

They can enter the first paragraph in the summary and rest in extended. That way you are pulling the summary from one field without trying to do a word or character count and you can just display both fields when someone wants to read the whole article.

Interesting idea; I suppose it could also be done in such a way as to automatically grab the first 100 words (or 50 or 25, whatever) from the article and then store the article as two seperate fields in the db, rather than having to have two entry boxes for a summation and then the article.

[trevor]

ok yeah, i ended up just doing it the way postnuke does it...simpilest way i guess.....thanks all!

[Epsilon]

The way I would do it (not sure if it's the most efficient way) is to grab the whole article from the database, use explode to load it into an array, splitting on the whitespace. Then chop off all elements past the 100th, then use implode to turn the array back into a string.

[sde]

and don't forget to put the '. . . . .' after only if it is over 100 words

[Epsilon]

I agree, you must put the '...', that's just proper writing skills.