Help with limiting text from DB

Hey,

I have developed a simple from system that allows users to input some comments. This all works fine, however when I try to retrieve the comments I only want to display 100 characters.

I am new to PHP, but was wondering if there is a string function that will let me take the data from a table in my database and then only display 100 characters followed by "..." afterwards.

Also I have thought of a potential problem... if someone enters less than 100 characters I only want to show the amount they have entered.

can anyone help?

This is something that should be done in your query rather than the application code. If you are always going to truncate the query result, it makes no sense to have to return all of the data from the database server.

If you're using MySQL, have a look at the MySQL String Functions—in particular, LEFT() will do what you need.