Is there any way to get the maximum size of a VARCHAR column?
Some function like "COLUMN_WIDTH(columname)", perhaps?

LENGTH gives the size of the contents, not the size limit of
the column, for VARCHAR columns. The output from DESCRIBE
requires parsing. The intent is to find out if an item is too
big before it goes into a file for a LOAD DATA INFILE and
aborts the whole load.

John Nagle

On Jul 9, 2:06*pm, John Nagle <na... (AT) animats (DOT) com> wrote:
I'm not sure what you are asking?
The size of the varchar(_) column you can find through mysql query
browser.
You find it in the data structure. You can see the databases tables
in the schema section.
You click on your table and copy the create table contents to the
clipboard then paste it into a query browser and you can see what the
size of the field is.
If you mean you have to check that all the data fits into that column
you have to loop through the rows and check them using file handling
routines.
Look up file handling in the php manual to know how to read to and
write to a file. You have to read each row and put the data into an
array to loop through the fields in the rows to check the data.

John Nagle <nagle (AT) animats (DOT) com> wrote:
SHOW [FULL] FIELDS ?
Or maybe you like INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS better?

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...mns-table.html


XL

On 7/9/2010 4:30 PM, JRough wrote:
No, you're not.

Yes, I know that.

What I want is to get the length of the field within SQL, so I
can use it in SQL expressions. It would be useful to put that
number in an SQL variable for use with LEFT during INSERT.

PHP?

John Nagle

On Jul 10, 12:30*am, JRough <jlro... (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:
Now I've seen everything, JRough trying to help someone else!