Question

I have a table which has column of descr which stores string values. Some of the values in descr has multi-byte characters in it and I want to know all those rows so I can remove those characters. How can I query the tables using MySQL functions to determine which rows have multi-byte characters. I am using MySQL version 5.1

Answer 1

SELECT ...
FROM yourtable
WHERE CHAR_LENGTH(descr) <> LENGTH(descr)

char_length is multi-byte aware and returns the actual character count. Length() is a pure byte-count, so a 3-byte char returns 3.