title: Laravel 4: how to display a preview of a post using eloquent ORM/blade
body: <p>I built a simple cms in Laravel 4. At the moment the main site index shows a list of all posts including the body of the post.</p>
  
  <p>I want to only show, for example, the first 100 letters of the body of my post as a preview before viewing the whole article on my show.blade.php page.</p>
  
  <p>The relevant part of the index.blade looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@foreach($posts as $post)
  ...
  &lt;p&gt;{{ $post-&gt;body }}&lt;/p&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And the relevant part of my DisplayController looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public function index()
  {
      $posts = $this-&gt;post-&gt;orderBy('id', 'DESC')-&gt;get();
  
      return View::make('index', compact('posts'));
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How would I display only the first 100 characters of each post on my index page (as an example)?</p>