How to limit the display of content from a database?

I am using the following code to display the title and body content of articles from a database. How can I make only the first 200 characters from the article's body appear as opposed to all the characters?

<?php

        $select = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM articles ORDER BY id DESC");
        while ($result = mysql_fetch_assoc($select))
    {
        $id     = $result['id'];
        $title  = $result['title'];
        $body   = $res开发者_开发问答ult['body'];

        echo "<h2><a name='$id'>" . $title . "</a></h2>";
        echo $body . "<br />";
    }

?>

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Change this line:

echo $body . "<br />";

To this:

echo (strlen($body) > 200) ? substr($body,0,200) : $body;
echo "<br />";

That utilizes the comparison operator (aka the ternary operator) to output only the first 200 characters if $body is over 200 chars in length, and the whole body otherwise.

A common technique you could use to mark a truncated block of text would be to add an ellipsis on the end of a truncated text block (three periods, or the HTML entity …). This is why I usually use the comparison operator here rather than just doing a substr($str,0,200), which would work for both cases, but not let you modify them separately.

substr($body, 0, 200)

Beware if you're storing markup in the database as this may chop a tag in half.

You can do this in PHP as the others have mentioned, or directly in your query as well (if you don't need all of the data on your page):

$select = mysql_query("SELECT id, title, SUBSTR(body, 0, 200) FROM articles ORDER BY id DESC"

I've created a function called limit. Maybe it will be useful for you as well.

function limit($string, $limit) {
        if (strlen($string) < $limit) {
            $result = substr($string, 0, $limit);
        }
        else
            $result =  substr($string, 0, $limit) . '...';
        return $result;
    }


echo limit('Testing my function', 5);

//Output
Test...