Limit length of longtext field in SELECT results

The best way to clean up the readability of the results from a query in your terminal window is to use the mysql pager, not modifying your query as that can be too cumbersome.

1. Set the pager:

   mysql> pager less -S

2. Do your query:

   mysql> SELECT * FROM ...

This will put your results in a more readable format. You can use your arrow keys to page up and down and left and right to see the full table. Just press Q to get out of pager mode for that query, and then just run

mysql> pager more

to return to the normal output river if you want.

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

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

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

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

To select first 100 chars.