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MySQL | LENGTH method

schedule Aug 12, 2023
Last updated
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MySQL
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MySQL's LENGTH(~) method returns the length of a string in bytes.

Parameters

1. str | string

The string whose length we want to return.

Return value

The length of the input string in bytes.

Examples

Consider the following table about some students:

student_id

fname

lname

day_enrolled

age

username

1

Sky

Towner

2015-12-03

17

stowner1

2

Ben

Davis

2016-04-20

19

bdavis2

3

Travis

Apple

2018-08-14

18

tapple3

4

Arthur

David

2016-04-01

16

adavid4

5

Benjamin

Town

2014-01-01

17

btown5

The above sample table can be created using the code here.

Basic usage

To return length of student first names in bytes:

SELECT LENGTH(fname)
FROM students;
+---------------+
| LENGTH(fname) |
+---------------+
| 3 |
| 3 |
| 6 |
| 6 |
| 8 |
+---------------+

Each character is represented using 1 byte (8bits) as these are ASCII characters.

To check bytes used to represent the Japanese character 'あ':

SELECT LENGTH('あ');
+---------------+
| LENGTH('あ') |
+---------------+
| 3 |
+---------------+

We can see that the single Japanese character 'あ' is represented using 3 bytes.

robocat
Published by Arthur Yanagisawa
Edited by 0 others
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