Return only first 500 characters of text
<p>I am having an issue where I cannot select the first 500 characters of each post. (Posts are stored in a MySQL database). The code I have right now is: </p>

<pre><code>$link = mysqli_connect( 'localhost', 'jfairbanks_dbuser', 'password' );
mysqli_select_db( $link, 'jfairbanks_database' );
$results = mysqli_query( $link, "SELECT post FROM Users where verified = 1 LIMIT 0 , 10" ); //this displayes all the posts that have been verified
while( $record = mysqli_fetch_assoc( $results ) ) {
 $post = $record['post'];
 print $post;
}
  mysqli_free_result( $results );
mysqli_close( $link );
?&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>That code selects all characters from all posts that are verified and that's good, but I need to restrict the length of the post that is displayed. (I want only the first 500 characters to be seen). </p>

<p>I tried using <code>LEFT(post, 500)</code> among other things but that did not work.</p>