How to truncate fields (newbie) - MySQL

[José Carlos Santos]

Hi all:

Suppose that I have a table with fields which can be rather long string
of characters. For instance, it can be a table called library concerning
the books from a library and the fields might be the title and the
author of the books. If I type

SELECT title, author FROM library;

this might be hard to read on screen. Is it possible to display, say,
only the first 20 characters of each field?

Best regards,

Jose Carlos Santos

[Kai Ruhnau]

José Carlos Santos wrote:

> Suppose that I have a table with fields which can be rather long string
> of characters. For instance, it can be a table called library concerning
> the books from a library and the fields might be the title and the
> author of the books. If I type
>
> SELECT title, author FROM library;
>
> this might be hard to read on screen. Is it possible to display, say,
> only the first 20 characters of each field?

[url]http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html[/url]

<snip>

LEFT(str,len)

Returns the leftmost len characters from the string str.

mysql> SELECT LEFT('foobarbar', 5);
-> 'fooba'

</snip>

Greetings
Kai

--
This signature is left as an exercise for the reader.

[José Carlos Santos]

On 01-05-2006 11:28, Kai Ruhnau wrote:

>> Suppose that I have a table with fields which can be rather long string
>> of characters. For instance, it can be a table called library concerning
>> the books from a library and the fields might be the title and the
>> author of the books. If I type
>>
>> SELECT title, author FROM library;
>>
>> this might be hard to read on screen. Is it possible to display, say,
>> only the first 20 characters of each field?

>
> [url]http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html[/url]
>
> <snip>
>
> LEFT(str,len)
>
> Returns the leftmost len characters from the string str.
>
> mysql> SELECT LEFT('foobarbar', 5);
> -> 'fooba'
>
> </snip>

Thanks for your reply, but I don't see how to use it in order to obtain
the effect that I mentioned: to get only the first 20 characters of each
field. For instance, it would be grat if

SELECT LEFT(title,20), LEFT(author,20) FROM library;

would do just that.

Best regards,

Jose Carlos Santos

[José Carlos Santos]

On 01-05-2006 17:00, Peter H. Coffin wrote:

>>> [url]http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html[/url]
>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>> LEFT(str,len)
>>>
>>> Returns the leftmost len characters from the string str.
>>>
>>> mysql> SELECT LEFT('foobarbar', 5);
>>> -> 'fooba'
>>>
>>> </snip>

>> Thanks for your reply, but I don't see how to use it in order to obtain
>> the effect that I mentioned: to get only the first 20 characters of each
>> field. For instance, it would be grat if
>>
>> SELECT LEFT(title,20), LEFT(author,20) FROM library;
>>
>> would do just that.

>
> Did you try that? What error did you get? Or did you get the results you
> were hoping for?

I thought I had tried and got an error... but now I tried again and it
worked just fine. Thanks for your help and sorry for wasting your time.

Best regards,

Jose Carlos Santos