Question

I have a encoded character buffer array of size 512 in C, and a database field of varchar in MySQL. Is it possible to store the encoded character buffer into varchar?

I have tried this, but the problem which I face is that it only stores the limited area of the buffer into the database and ignore. What is the actual problem, and how do I solve this problem?

Answer 1

It is not clear what you mean by encoded.

If you mean that you have an arbitrary string of byte values, then varchar is a bad fit because it will attempt to trim trailing spaces. A better choice in such cases is to use varbinary fields.

If the string you are inserting contains control characters, you might be best converting that into a hex string and inserting it like follows:

create table xx ( 
    v varbinary(512) not null );

insert into xx values ( 0x68656C6C6F20776F726C64);

This will prevent any component in the tool chain from choking on NUL characters and so forth.