fetch specific data from database using php

Question

i would like to ask for an idea of how to fetch information from my database without getting everything in it. For example: i have an article that is consisted of 10 paragraphs in my database but i would only want to fetch 200 characters from it (so that i could have sustained information for my articles preview). Thanks in advance

currently i am using this code to fetch my data but it gives me everything from the database

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tblArticles Where id='".$_POST['num']."'");

    $count=mysql_num_rows($result);
        if($count>0)
            {
    $row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );
                        $id=$row[0];
                        $title=$row[1];
                        $contents=$row[2];

            }

Answer 1

Try (make sure you change the field names in the SQL query to the actual field names):

$result = mysql_query("
    SELECT id AS article_id, 
           article_title, 
           SUBSTRING(article_content, 1, 200) AS article_content 
    FROM tblArticles 
    WHERE id='" . mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['num']) . "'");

$count=mysql_num_rows($result);

if($count>0)
{
    $row = mysql_fetch_assoc( $result );

    $id=$row['article_id'];
    $title=$row['article_title'];
    $contents=$row['article_content'];
}

I've added the MySQL function SUBSTRING() to the SQL query. This will retrieve a partial string from a whole string. For example, substring(field, 1, 100) , will retrieve all the text between character 1 and character 100 from the field.

You should also avoid using MySQL_* functions. There not recommended for use in new code. Instead, look into PDO or MySQLi