Creating a Preview box - php

Question

I have made a small div box, just enough to contain 2 and a half line of sentence. But actually what I want to do is, I am just showing the preview (few lines of sentence ). And I want to add "read more..." at the end of the sentence, which when clicked by the user would lead to another page showing the whole article.
I am extracting these article from the database. My problem is, how to extract just a few line from the database and preview it in the small div box...?
what is the best way to do it? how should I control the amount of the text as a preview to be shown in a div box.
can it be controlled with Javascript, PhpMysql extraction code, CSS ? what is the best way ?
note:
(I am extracting article from database. As a test bed I am using the wamp server along with its mysql database)

Answer 1

What you can do is extract the whole text from the database, and run the following javascript on your text nodes:
Cutter.js
From their documentation:
Cutter.run( oApplyTo, oTarget, nWords, oTexts, oClasses )

Answer 2

You can do something like excerpt column in your database and show it in your div box and when user clicks on read more you can load full text from db. Or you can write simple js script which will be cut everything you don't need. Or you can give your div box an size via css and set overflow property to hidden:
.excerpt {
width: xx px;
height: xx px;
overflow: hidden;
}

Answer 3

Not the ANSWER, but some hints:
You may try ajax, to fetch the entire article & clip it using js.
Alternately, provide a server side support to provide clipped article & fetch that using ajax.
After you have got the clipped part of the article, it should be fairly easy to display it in the div, using innerHTML.
To fix the location of the div box, you can either use js or css.