Limited amount of text from record

How would I be able to only show say 300 characters from the description field when I retrieve records from MySQL?

$query = "SELECT id, name, price, image_url, description FROM `products` ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 4;";
database_inquiry($query, $rows);
$products = $rows;


<?=$item['description']; ?>

Code (markup):

 

Well...do you want mysql to limit what it returns for the description to <= 300 characters, or do you want mysql to return the entire description and do the limiting in php?

 

i want to do the limiting in php

 

<?=substr($item['description'],0,300); ?>

PHP:

 

rep added, cheers!

 

Thank you very much