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Reporting with SQL

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Creating Excerpts From Text

2:19 with Andrew Chalkley

Wouldn't it be cool to create excerpts like this...

To create smaller strings from larger piece of text you can use the SUBSTR() funciton or the substring function.'

SELECT SUBSTR(<value or column>, <start>, <length>) FROM <table>;

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    With large bodies of text, 0:00
    you often don't want to show all of the text, all of the time. 0:01
    For example, when I search on google.com for treehouse sql, you'll 0:05
    see there's a lot of these ellipses or three full stops after each other. 0:10
    This is because search engines want to provide you with enough information 0:16
    in a standardized way without overloading you with too much information. 0:20
    You don't want information overload. 0:25
    It standardizes the output and doesn't clutter up the page. 0:27
    You may want to do this yourself sometime, for example, on an archive on a blog, 0:31
    or the search pages listing product descriptions on an e-commerce site. 0:37
    And that's exactly what we're going to do, 0:42
    search through the product descriptions and only return an excerpt. 0:44
    The technique we'll be using is called getting the substring of a string, 0:50
    obtaining a smaller piece of text from a larger piece. 0:55
    The function we'll be using is the SUBSTR function. 1:00
    SUBSTR is short for substring. 1:03
    The SUBSTR function is different from other functions 1:06
    because it requires more than just the column name. 1:09
    It requires the start position and 1:12
    the length, meaning the length of the substring. 1:15
    Each of the values are separated by a comma. 1:18
    Let's see this in action. 1:22
    When we run this query in the SQL Playground, we see the first 1:24
    30 characters of the product description, followed by an ellipses. 1:28
    Let's review this substring function to see what it's doing. 1:33
    First we include the description column 1:38
    because that's what we want to generate the substring from. 1:40
    Then, the numeric position of the character we want to begin 1:44
    the substring at. 1:48
    In most circumstances, it's the first character. 1:50
    Then the length of the desired substring, 30. 1:54
    Finally, after the function call, we have the concatenation of ellipses. 1:58
    If we alter the 30 to another value and 2:04
    execute this query, the short description substring changes with that value. 2:06
    We'll continue working with text in fun and 2:13
    exciting ways after a short assessment break. 2:16

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