[NDBounce]

Hello,

I am working for a non-profit group. We put out a newletter on a weekly basis. Currently it sits on an asp page that I developed (limited asp skills) which pulls the articles from a database.

My boss asked if we could change the format so that we have a page similar to what MacNN does where it gives you a few lines of a story and then says click here to read full story.

I don't know an efficient way to do this, one thing I thougt that will work but seems shoddy at best is to take the body of the article, loop through it one character at a time grabbing 100 charcters (arbitrary number) and then keep looping grabing one character at at time until I get a space...

While I am pretty certain that would loop, I am sure there is a better way to do this...can someone give me an idea...

Thank you,

O
B unce!

[bens1901]

Just off the top of my head, I could think of 2 possible approaches:

1) [in very silly psuedo-code...]
tempString = article_from_db
tempString2 = SubString( tempString, 0, 100 )
x = locationOfLastSpaceChar( tempString2 )
articleIntroText = SubString( tempString2, 0, x )

2) have a db field for the article's intro text (I worked on a project at a Fortune100 company that had us use this approach) This implementation would let an administrative user view the article and possibly edit/specify the intro text to the article

Hope this helps.

-Ben

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by NDBounce:
Hello,

I am working for a non-profit group. We put out a newletter on a weekly basis. Currently it sits on an asp page that I developed (limited asp skills) which pulls the articles from a database...

I hate mangled intros that arbitrarily cut off sentences so the context is lost. I'd try an algorithm that looks for either the first full stop or the first newline character (you're using unformatted text, right?) so that at least you have a fully-formed intro sentence to work with.

On the other hand, Smarty has an inbuilt 'trim' function that can do what you want - check it out at smarty.php.net