CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sqlpostgresqlshell
Melissa
Melissa

Reputation: 1276

In Postgres psql shell, is it possible to just display the first line of a large text field?

I'm saving some huge chunks of text into a Postgres table's text field.

I'd like to see just the first 20 or so character of the text field displayed on my psql shell.

I'm currently running in psql:

select * from tablename;

and it's not showing anything in the terminal because it's too large.

The data is definitely saved, because I can display them online.

As you can see when I describe the table, the "datatext" field I'm using is a "text" type.

 \d+ mytablename;
                                                       Table "public.mytablename"
  Column  |           Type           |                         Modifiers                          | Storage  | Stats target | Description
----------+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+----------+--------------+-------------
 id       | integer                  | not null default nextval('mytablename_id_seq'::regclass) | plain    |              |
 when     | timestamp with time zone | not null                                                   | plain    |              |
 datatext | text                     | not null                                                   | extended |              |
Indexes:
    "mytablename_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1114

Answers (1)

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 7451

If you only want to display the first 20 characters of text in a field, you can do this:

SELECT LEFT(datatext,20) AS First_20_Chars FROM tablename LIMIT 1;

You can control how many records return using the LIMIT statement at the end.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions