MySQL truncate text with ellipsis

Question

Suppose I have a MySQL table of one column: \"Message\". It is of type TEXT. I now want to query all rows, but the text can be large (not extremely large but large) and I on

Answer 1

You can declare a new ELLIPSIS function in order to make your query readable:

DELIMITER //

CREATE FUNCTION ELLIPSIS ( str TEXT, max_length INT )
RETURNS TEXT

BEGIN
   DECLARE str_out TEXT;

   IF LENGTH(str) <= max_length THEN
      SET str_out = str;
      
   ELSE
      SET str_out = CONCAT(SUBSTR(str, 1, max_length), '...');

   END IF;
   
   RETURN str_out;

END; //

DELIMITER ;

Then you simply do:

SELECT ELLIPSIS(Message, 10);