Counting Characters and Date Question

[t5amec]

Q1. I am developing a News page for my site and on the Home Page i want to just include a short snippet (approx 177 characters including spaces) on the content, then anything after that would be left out and there would be a "more..." link to the actual news item page.

Q2. The date would be auto generated using the NOW() function, but that come up with YYYY-MM-DD, how can i modify it so it comes up with DD-MMM-YYYY(if possible)

Q3. On the Home Page I only want the five latest news items to be on there. How can I do a query that will only show the five latest posts?

My coding for the Home Page is below:

<?
include("dbinfo.inc.php");
mysql_connect(localhost,$username,$password);
@mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database"); 
$query="SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY id ASC";
$result=mysql_query($query);

$num=mysql_numrows($result);

mysql_close();

echo "";

?>

<!-- BORING HTML GOES HERE --!>

<? $i=0; 
while ($i < $num) { 
$date=mysql_result($result,$i,"date");
$author=mysql_result($result,$i,"author"); 
$headline=mysql_result($result,$i,"headline"); 
$content=mysql_result($result,$i,"content"); 
$id=mysql_result($result,$i,"id"); 
?>
<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="80%" colspan="2" align="center">
<a href="news.php?=<? echo "$id"; ?>"><? echo "$headline"; ?></a>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100" height="75" valign="middle">
<p align="center"><a href="contact?=<? echo "$author"; ?>"><img src="images/<? echo "$author"; ?>.jpg" width="60" height="60" alt="Email <? echo "$author"; ?>" 
border="0" style="border: 1px solid rgb(0,0,0)"></a>
</td>
<td width="81%" valign="middle">
<p align="left"><b><? echo "$date"; ?></b><br><? echo "$content"; ?> <a href="news.php?=<? echo "$id"; ?>" class="news">more...</a>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="20">
</td>
</tr>
<?
++$i;
} 
echo "</table>";


?>
<!-- THE REST OF THE HTML GOES HNOIRE --!>

For those interested, this is the addy to the home page: (

http://www.time2beheard.co.uk/beheard/index2.php

)

Make Sense? I hope so (-:

 

[Bastien]

for the content you can use the link www.php.net/substring]substr function[/url]

for the date

use the date() to format the output

$date = date("d-m-Y",$rows['datefield']);

Bastien

I wish my computer would do what I want it to do,
instead of what I tell it to do...

 

[jpadie]

and for the limitation on posts, try adding "limit 5" to the end of your sql query.

 

[t5amec]

I can't work out the date coding... what part of the PHP coding should I edit for changing it?

I changed it on the first:

$date=mysql_result($result,$i,"date");

but that changed the dates to the correct format, but returned 01-01-1970...

Make Sense? I hope so (-:

 

[jpadie]

Hi

the confusion may be because you are not retrieving the database infor in the way that the majority of users do so (using mysql_fetch_assoc or mysql_fetch_array).

in your method change the relevant line to

$date=date("d m Y",mysql_result($result,$i,"date"));

hth
Justin

 

[t5amec]

returning exactly the same result as before (01-01-1970)...

is that a default date or something?

Make Sense? I hope so (-:

 

[jpadie]

oops. i had assumed that you were storing a unix timestamp in your database.

assuming you have a normal mysql format date in your db then change the code to be as follows:

$date=date("d m Y",strtotime(mysql_result($result,$i,"date")));

 

[t5amec]

NICE ONE! Cheers dude.

Make Sense? I hope so (-:

 

[jpadie]

forgot to answer your question, though.

jan 1 1970 is the beginning of the unix epoch from which timestamps are taken. eg taking a timestamp now you would receive the number of seconds since midnight in 1/1/70 (this is very useful for doing calculations).