Limit number of rows or characters returned in a text field 1

[3dColor]

I understand you can limit the rows of a recordset, but can you somehow tell a query to limit the rows (or characters) returned within just a text field?

I have a page that returns abstracts of many articles and I want to truncate the description for each to just 200 characters. Is there a way to accomplish this with MySQL?

Thanks!

 

[TonyGroves]

Sure:
[tt]
SELECT LEFT(charfield,200) ...
[/tt]