title: How to show first few lines of a large paragraph?
body: <p>Please look at the picture: </p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/BpRtR.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>This is my community forum page. I use at the first row #, Title, Replies &amp; Post Date. Now I want to add another column called Description that will show the first few lines of the whole topic. For example, here the second Title goes as "Components of Computer", but I want show it like "Components of .......". You got the point?</p>
  
  <p>Anyway I store all my data in database. To more assistance here is my code of this page.</p>
  
  <pre><code>echo "&lt;table border='0' width='100%' id='table-3'&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;#&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;Title&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;Replies&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;Post Date&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;";
  $sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM topics ORDER BY id DESC");
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)) {
      $replies = mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("SELECT * FROM replies WHERE
                 topic_id='" . $row['id'] . "'"));
      echo "&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;" . $row['id'] . "&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href='show_topic.php?id=" . $row['id']                                                                                          
            . "'&gt; &lt;b&gt;" . $row['title'] . "&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;" . $replies . "&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;" .  
            date("d M Y", $row['date']) . "  &lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;";
  }
  </code></pre>