Newbie Question re substr

Hi, I'm really new and getting lots of help but need some assistance. I'm running a script which gets specific articles from a database if they're entered in the URL after the ? . For instance if someone asks for www.foo.com/index.htm?a=1234 then the script would look for an database entry with the id of 1234 and display it in the page. If there's no number specified (www.foo.com/index.htm) or if the number given is to an article which doesn't exist, it gets the titles of all the articles available and prints them as links to the proper article number. I'd also like it to grab the first 200 characters of text from the $content field of the entry. With help I have the title link part and I suspect I'm close but I keep messing up the syntax The code is: <snip> if (!empty($where)) { echo "  <ul>"; $article = mysql_fetch_assoc($result); } else { while ($article = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) { $table_of_contents[] = " <li><a href='{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}?a={$article['article_id']}' title='{$article['title']}'>{$article['title']}</a><br /> $article['content'] = substr($article['content'], 0 200);</li>"; } } echo "  </ul>"; </snip> Can anyone help ? Thanks in advance!