I'm no expert though. Is it possible? Can anyone enlighten?

SUBSTRING_INDEX() : Return a substring from a string before the specified number of occurrences of the delimiter

And if you look at the actual description you see that positive n (count of the delimiter) returns the string to the left of the delimiter whilst negative n (e.g. -2) return the substring to the right of the nth delimiter. Now image that the delimiter is ' ' (which can be explicitly stated in Mysql as '<space>').

And here is an example:



mysql> SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX('A bunch of words that you only want the
+ first fifteen from goes here as this example shows nicely',' ',15) A
+S first_15 FROM property LIMIT 1;
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+----+
| first_15                                                            
+    |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+----+
| A bunch of words that you only want the first fifteen from goes here
+ as | 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+----+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX('But what if only a few words?',' ',15) 
+AS first_15 FROM property LIMIT 1;
+-------------------------------+
| first_15                      |
+-------------------------------+
| But what if only a few words? | 
+-------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
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