MySQL Order Table By Character Length

24th September 2009 - 1 minute read time

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As part of debugging a bit of code I needed to know the longest possible field lengths that a record contains. You might need to know this if you are performing a database migration. The following query returns a field, along with the length of the string, and orders the results by the number of characters in that string.

SELECT field, CHARACTER_LENGTH(field) as fieldCharacterCount
FROM table
ORDER BY fieldCharacterCount DESC

MySQL

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