retrieving only part of the record in database

Question

I have a database which contains some topics each with a title and some description. In the title page, I have to display all the titles and a few lines of description for that topic. When a user clicks on one topic then he is taken to a page where he can find the entire description. Exactly like stackoverflow site, where description of each question is displayed in short.

I was wondering is there a way we can retrieve such short description from the database directly or should the front end parse the retrieved record and truncate it accordingly? Is there a way to query for a short version of the record from the database directly. I am using MySql as my database and php to display web pages.

Answer 1

SELECT SUBSTRING(`title`, 0, 100) FROM `topics`

Answer 2

I would say the answer is found in this post: SQL Server substring breaking on words, not characters

You wouldn't want to just limit by a string length, since then you might cut off a word right in the middle. Instead, you would want to set your max length and then move back to the place where there is a space.

Another option would be to run this once and then update a field in the table that stores the truncated text. That way you could limit your extra SQL calls and yet still have the nicely-formatted summary text.