Drawing certain number of characters from string

[bobnew32]

Ok I have a variable that is about 3000 character long that is an article. I want to have a preview of the article so the viewer can see the first paragraph of it.

So, what I need to do is be able to draw the first 580 characters from the variable and assign it to a new variable. Please help, it should be a simple one line of code. Thx

[killroy]

$summary=left($text,580)

Just a guess, I don't know PHP.

SN

[bobnew32]

Is that correct or did you make it up?

[justageek]

$newvar = substr($oldvar,0,580);