title: MySQL: how to trim the content of a cell to make SELECT output more readable
body: <p>I have a MySQL table with 6 columns. Some of the columns contain long JSON strings that have newlines and spaces. When I list the content of the table with the SELECT statement, the output is very messy.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a command (or default setting I can change), to limit the output of each column to the first few meaningful characters, so that each row will show as single line regardless of the cell content? Something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>+---------------------------+-------------------------+---------+-----------+--------------+----------+
  | jsondata                  | column2                 | column3 | column4   | column5      | column6  |
  +---------------------------+-------------------------+---------+-----------+--------------+----------+
  | { "Text":[{"user_id":"3","| ABCDEFABCDEFABCDEFABC   |       3 | ABCABCA   | txt          | { "email"|
  +---------------------------+-------------------------+---------+-----------+--------------+----------+
  </code></pre>