[Rollo Tamasi]

I'm currently pulling out articles from a database but the articles are quite large and when i display more than 3 articles on a single page the page becomes too chaotic with text.

How can only show the first 50 words of the article?

<?php echo $entry; ?> is all i'm using to display the articles and i'm using a straight forward sql statement as well if it makes any difference? :
$sql = "SELECT * FROM php_blog WHERE category='$category' ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 5";

Thanks

[Keith]

This will limit the string to a certain amount of words. I don't know how you plan on displaying individual articles so I'm taking my best guess.

PHP Code:

<?php



function WordLimit( $string, $id = 0, $words = 50 )

{

    $stringTmp = preg_replace( '/\s\s+/', ' ', ereg_replace( '<[^>]*>', ' ', trim( $string ) ) );

    $stringTmp = explode( ' ', $stringTmp );

    $words = intval( $words );

    if ( $words > 0 AND count( $stringTmp ) > $words )

    {

        $string = '';

        for ( $i = 0; $i < $words; $i++ )

            $string .= empty( $string ) ? $stringTmp[$i] : ' ' . $stringTmp[$i];

        $string .= '...';

        $string = preg_replace( '/(\.|\,|\;|\:)+(\.\.\.)$/', '...', $string );

        if ( intval( $id ) > 0 )

            $string .= " (<a href=\"articles.php?id={$id}\">more</a>)";

    }

    return $string;

}



// Example

echo WordLimit( $row['text'], $row['id'], 50 );



?>

...
Added a conditional check to make sure $words > 0... you know, just in case.