Retreive first characters from a field

[nicuz]

I have a field in my database called "description" (type:longtext) and I would like to retreive the first let's say 13 characters. What wold the select query be?

[dreamcatcher]

Hi nicuz,

You can use the MySQL string function SUBSTRING [dev.mysql.com].

Select SUBSTRING(description,0,13) as new_text FROM table...

Then use the 'new_text' variable to access the data.

dc