Summarising results in searches (PHP)

[Mong]

I did this, can anybody suggest a more elegant way to do it?

function snippet ($content)
{
	$content = substr ($content, 0, 100);
	$content = strrev ($content);
	$end = strpos ($content, " ");
	$end = strlen ($content) - $end;
	$content = strrev ($content);
	$content = substr ($content, 0, $end);
	$content = $content." ...";
	return $content;
}

M.

[queball]

Yeah, you should do it all on one line.
substr($content, strrchr(substr($content, 0, 100), " "))." ...";

Are you sure $content is over 100 chars and has a whitespace in? I don't see why splitting words is so b...

[MT]

I had a nice way of doing it using mysql functions (assuming the data was coming from a mysql query). Unfortunately, didnt end up using at the time, so it's on my home machine :/

[Atamur]

doesn't php have perl-like regexp support? in perl you could do

s/^(.{100,}?)\W.*$/$1.../

to keep everything up to the first non-word charcter after 100 characters and replace the rest with ...

[queball]

Not quite the same, as Mong's takes at most a hundred characters (when the 100th character is a space), while that PCRE takes at least 100 characters. So if there's supercajifrajiliciousexpialidocious starting at character one-hundred, it'll return a fair bit more than Mong's maximum of 104 chars. Though it has the added advantage of failing on strings under 100 chars.

[BuddhistPunk]

From the conext of the thread I am assuming that you are pulling the initial value of content from a DB.

Rather than getting your query to return the entire value in the table, it is possible to throttle the return result so that it only returns the first (or last) X characters.

If this query is going to be run many times, this method will save alot of unnecessary db usage.

[Mong]

This query is run every time a user searches. The database is MySQL 3.23.52. I searched the MySQL docs for ways of limiting the amount returned, but can't find anything

M.

[queball]

Originally posted by Mong
This query is run every time a user searches. The database is MySQL 3.23.52. I searched the MySQL docs for ways of limiting the amount returned, but can't find anything

M.

You just need a substring; substring(res,1,100) stylee.