Displaying first 20 words.

I have a mysql database. I want to have, a sort of "intro" to each article for my site at www.geekswithpcs.com. I want to know the variable to display the frist, say 20-30 words of the article, ON my interface, then i want to have a "Read More..." button. So, my question is as follows, what is the variable or command FOR the displaying for about 20-30 words, from a mysql cell?

Check out http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.wordwrap.php. There are any number of ways you could do this, but I hadn't run across this function before and thought I'd give it a shot. Something like the following code should work. I'm assuming for the sake of this example that your mysql column is in $str.



The wordwrap function returns your string cut on word boundaries with the second parameter as the max col count. The third parameter is the character you wish to cut your string with. So you can feed the results of wordwrap to split, splitting on the character you used to cut, and voila, you've got an array whose zero element is, in this case, not more than 75 characters wide.

You could also do something like the following:



This code splits a string into its words and then prints the first 25 elements of the words array.