String truncate on length, but no chopping up of words allowed

Question

I want to limit a string field length in MYSQL on a certain length, but I don\'t want any chopping up of words to occur.

When I do:

SELECT SUBSTRING(         


        

Answer 1

Let @str be your string and @len the initial position to cut at. Then the necessary steps could be:

1. Take the leftmost @len characters of @str.

2. Reverse the substring.

3. Find the position of the first space in the reversed substring.

4. Subtract 1 from the position. But if no space was found, let the position remain 0.

5. Subtract the found position from @len and call it cutpos.

6. Take the first (leftmost) cutpos characters of @str as str1, take all the other characters (starting from cutpos+1) as str2.

SELECT
  LEFT(str, cutpos) AS str1,
  SUBSTRING(str, cutpos + 1) AS str2
FROM (
  SELECT
    @str AS str,
    @len - IFNULL(NULLIF(LOCATE(' ', REVERSE(LEFT(@str, @len))), 0) - 1, 0) AS cutpos
) s