Article Preview with substring

[Trmbne2000]

Hello,

I'm developing a press release system, and on the homepage, they want a short preview of the article. I would consider using left(...) to take the first x characters, however there is HTML in the articles. If you take a substring, you could end up with unclosed html tags, or end up somewhere in the middle of a tag (<a href="http://ww) Does anyone know of any functions that will let you take the proper amount of text, and leave the html tags intact?

[DrBunchman]

Hi Trmbne2000,

You could write a function to do this that would parse through the string removing the html tags and creating a new string for you. This example below should help you to build something to suit your needs.

 
flgHTML = False
For i = 0 to 50 
  If Mid(sString, i, 1) = "<" Then
	 flgHTML = True
	 i=i+1
  End If
 
  If Mid(sString, i, 2) = "/>" Then
	 flgHTML = False
	 i=i+2
  End If
  If flgHTML = False Then sNewString = sNewString + Mid(sString, i, 1)
Next

Let me know how you get on,

Dr B