How To Reduce Number Of MySQL Select Character

Here is a tutorial explaining how to limit or reduce the number of character gotten when a MySQL database (and table) is queried.

Below is a practical example on how to achieve this via PHP.

Firstly, query the database;

<?php $sql = $mysqli->query("SELECT * FROM test LIMIT 1");?>

Next, we are going to fetch the result and reduce the number of character to “10” using the substr PHP function.
```
<?php while ($row = $sql->fetch_object())  :
echo substr($row->name, 0, 10); ?> 
```
In the above code, are outputting the first 10 characters. you can change the “0” in the above code to the number of character length you want to output.
To add a triple dot “…” signifying some character has been stripped, the code can be modified to;
```
<?php while ($row = $sql->fetch_object()) :
$num = 10;
echo substr($row->name, 0, $num); 
if($num >= 10): echo"...";
endif;
endwhile; ?>
```