On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 05:26:07PM -0700, Matthew Peter wrote: > Thanks. I'll check it out asap. I didn't realize the > regex expressions needed to be escaped for it to be a > valid expression. If you use ordinary quotes (') around the regular expression then you have to escape the backslashes because there's an extra level of string parsing that you're probably unaccustomed to. If you use dollar quotes (available since 8.0) then you don't need the extra escapes: SELECT id, substring(content FROM $$((\S+\s*){1,3})$$) FROM article; > Would it be possible to choose what paragraph to use in a summary? You might be able to use split_part(). For example, if paragraphs are separated by pairs of newline (\n) characters, then the following should return each article's third paragraph: SELECT id, split_part(content, '\n\n', 3) FROM article; See "String Functions and Operators" and "Pattern Matching" in the documentation for more information. If you need to get fancy then consider writing a function in a language like PL/Perl. -- Michael Fuhr ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly