Limit length of longtext field in SELECT results

Question

I'm executing a SELECT query on a table in MySQL using the command-line interface (not a GUI client):

SELECT * FROM blog_entry;

One of blog_entry's fields is of type 'longtext' and is such a long piece of text that when the result is displayed in my terminal the display of rows takes more than one line. This causes an ugly mess of a display, where columns aren't easily visible. What technique can I use in my SELECT query that would limit the number of characters displayed for each field so that the printed row results don't overflow to new lines?

Answer 1

Use MySQL's SUBSTRING function, as described in the documentation. Like:

SELECT SUBSTRING(`text`, 1, 100) FROM blog_entry; 

To select first 100 chars.

Answer 2

You can use the LEFT() function to get only the first characters:

SELECT LEFT(LongField, 20) AS LongField_First20chars FROM ...