CHARACTER_LENGTH

Syntax

SQL

CHARACTER_LENGTH (str)
CHAR_LENGTH (str)

Arguments

str: any string or binary object.

Return Type

Integer

Examples

SQL

SELECT CHARACTER_LENGTH('olé'), LENGTH('olé');

+--------------------------+----------------+
| CHARACTER_LENGTH('olé')  | LENGTH('olé')  |
+--------------------------+----------------+
|                        3 |              4 |
+--------------------------+----------------+

Caution

Implicit Collation

When character_set_server is set to utf8, string literals with characters using 4-byte encoding are implicitly assigned binary collation and processed as a sequence of bytes rather than characters. This implicit conversion to binary collation causes string functions to return unexpected results. To avoid using implicit binary collation, either use explicit type casting or use database columns defined with the utf8mb4 character set.

For more information, refer to Implicit Collation in Special Cases.