Is there a way to shorten the data returned by a query? I have a field with a image file name i.e. "image.jpg", what I want to display on the php page is just the "image" part. I'm wondering id there is a way to strip off the last four characters (.jpg) of the field?

Nick %-)

to answer your specific question, to strip off the last four characters, you could try a combination of nested functions involving LEFT and LENGTH - 4

but mysql has an even neater function

to remove the "extension" portion of a file name, and assuming that the file name contains only one "dot" (period), the following will work nicely whether the extension is 3 characters or four (e.g. oldnickj.jpeg versus oldnickj.jpg)

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(filename,'.',1) AS image ...

And a thing of beauty it is

thanks again