select first fifteen words

[tolkienarda]

hi all

i need to select the first fifteen words of an article stored in a mysql database. so i have the basic idea laid out but the exact syntax seems a bit confusing. i have a book here on regular expressions and i think it has confused more than before.

so here is basicaly what i want to do

select the first word what ever it may be, so /S+ i think should match 1 or more non white space charters and then a /s then repete that fifteen times like so

/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s/S+/s

now i know that there has to be a better way to do that so if anyone knows please relive my ignorance

eric

[Motoma]

Do you need to select fifteen words using SQL or are you doing it with PHP?

[tolkienarda]

i am currently trying to do it in php but if there is a good way to do it with sql i would be open to doing it that way.

eric

[Motoma]

i am currently trying to do it in php but if there is a good way to do it with sql i would be open to doing it that way.

eric

In PHP just explode() on spaces, and do a for loop to concatenate the first 15 words.

[tolkienarda]

wow that makes life easy

i thought i was going to have to use regular expressions. and i have been avoiding those and hope i can continue to do so for the remainder of time

eric

[steven]

Uhhh, that's a longwinded way of doing it though.

It would be much simpler to use a regular expression.

$expression = "/(\w+\s+){15}/";
$words = "this is a sentence containing a good deal more than fifteen different words but only the first 15 words should be matched!";
preg_match($expression, $words, $matches);
 

The output of $matches[0]

this is a sentence containing a good deal more than fifteen different words but only