Can select return specific number of chars?

[llandyjunk]

I was creating a dropdown list and was going to populate it with the first 5 chars of a series of characters pulled from a database, and I was thinking it would make it much faster if I could just get the first 5 chars of the column from the database than to get the full value, then cut off the rest of the characters. For example, I have a column that has values like E0B32-23, etc etc (and all of them are in this same format), and I only want the chars before the dash returned from the select query. Is there a way to do this with select?