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How do you limit the amount of characters shown in a table?

Coding

How do you limit the amount of characters shown in a table?

by  FAM  Posted    (Edited  )
When pulling data from a mysql table you may want to limit the amount of characters shown within a column to control the size of the table.

This basic script connects to a mysql database, pulls 4 columns of data into a html table and using the [link http://uk.php.net/substr]substr[/link] function, it limits 'Column 2' to 30 characters and also appending '...' to the 30th character.

Code: 
<?php
$host="localhost";
$user="root";
$pass="";
$database="databasename";

$sConn = mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass) or die("Couldn't connect to database server");
$dConn = mysql_select_db($database, $sConn)or die("Couldn't connect to database $database");

echo '<table border="1" width="100%"><tr align="center"><td>Column 1</td><td>Column 2</td><td>Column 3</td><td>Column 4</td></tr>';

$CharacterLimit=30; 	// Define how many characters to be displayed

$sql = "SELECT * FROM tablename";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
	echo "<tr>\n";
	echo "<td width='25%'>".$row['Column1']."</td>\n";
	
	$Column2 = $row['Column2'];
	$ColumnLimit = substr($Column2, 0, $CharacterLimit);
	echo "<td width='25%'>".$ColumnLimit."...</td>\n";
	echo "<td width='25%'>".$row['Column3']."</td>\n";
	echo "<td width='25%'>".$row['Column4']."</td>\n";
	echo "</tr>\n";
}
echo "</table>";
?>
To go more in-depth you could could count the characters of 'Column 2' and if the result was less than 30, you would not need to append the '...'!

Hope this is of some use.
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