Re [PHP] Newbie Question re substr: Solved

Sorry if this posts twice. Thanks everyone for the help. The missing comma was the problem with the display; the missing specification of the column at the start of the sql query was the problem with getting the data from the column. Again, thanks all who replied for the fast and excellent help. On 8 Mar 2005, at 11:40, Richard Lynch wrote:

1.     $content = substr($article['content'], 0 200); // get first 200

chars is choking, and I've looked in docs and can't understand why. I get Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_LNUMBER in /usr/www/users/domain/dynamic/templates/substr.htm on line 57

In this line, PHP is somehow encountering a T_NUMBER (a number) where it *expects* to see something else. Like a comma. Look between your 0 and 200 very carefully.

Thanks for taking the time. I had suspected that earlier, but when I put it in all sorts of OTHER stuff happened. Then I saw your post and tried again. I saw that I had made another mistake later on. So you've solved that part - thanks!. Except....Except it doesn't pull the content from the db and substr it to 200 characters. It pulls the id number and the title no problem, and I am sure that $article['content'] points to the right place (or at least it's named right) but it's just not getting the content: if (!empty($where)) { echo "  <ul>"; $article = mysql_fetch_assoc($result); } else { while ($article = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {

    // humanize data
    $article_id = $article['article_id'];
    $title = $article['title'];
    $content = substr($article['content'], 0, 400); // get first 200 chars
    // print and see if we get, what we expect
    // print "id=$article_id<br>title=$title<br>content=$content<p>";
    // now make the real stuff
    $table_of_contents[] = "<li><a href='{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}?a={$article_id}'}&title='{$title}'>{$article['title']}</a><br/
$content<br /><a href='{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}?a={$article['article_id']}' title='{$article['title']}'> ... [Read article]</a></li></li>";

} } echo "  </ul>"; Thanks in advance. . .