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Posted by "Richard Lynch" on 10/29/05 22:37
On Sat, October 29, 2005 6:36 am, Danny wrote:
> I need to extract 50 words more or less from a description field. How
> can i
> do that?. Substr, cuts the words. Is there any other way to that,
> without
> using and array? I mean and implemented function in PHP 4.x
> I´ve been googling around, but wordwrap, and substr is driving me
> mad...
Keep in mind that the "pipe" between your database and PHP is a rather
small narrow expensive opening.
Sucking down your ENTIRE description field to throw away all but 50
characters may not be the best use of limited resources.
[This is all MOOT if you have no dreams of your site being "big" some
day.]
You therefore may want to consider something like:
select substring(description, 1, instr(description, ' ', 50)) as
description_50, substring(description, instr(description, ' ', 50), 1)
as more from ...
$description_50 will be 50 chars, more or less
$more will tell you if there was "more" or not
You will only be getting ~50 characters squeezed through that narrow
expensive db <-> PHP pipeline.
I believe that in MOST PHP/database applications this is going to be a
better performing solution, and it's somewhat "cleaner" aesthetically
than shoveling a bunch of data around that you're going to discard
anyway.
* instr may or may not be the right function in your database. I
always forget the name of this one and have to look it up.
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