Question

How can I find out how long the value of a column is. Something like:

SELECT * FROM `tablename` WHERE `field`.length > 20

I know that this statement is wrong. I just don’t know how to phrase it. I can’t seem to find any documentation on the matter.

So I need to select all rows from a table that the phone field has more than 20 characters.

I imported a file and my customer merged 2 phones numbers in 1 fields, so I need to get all thoses affected rows to fix them.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

You can use the length() function to determine how many characters the field has in it.

SELECT * 
FROM `tablename` 
WHERE length(`field`) > 20

If you think you will have whitespace, then you can combine it with TRIM():

SELECT * 
FROM `tablename` 
WHERE length(trim(`field`)) > 20