Question

I have often SQL statements of the kind

SELECT LENGTH(col_name) FROM `table` WHERE *condition*

to establish the size of the contents of a specific column in a given row of a mySQL table. However, it is not clear to me that there is a single SQL statement that would fetch the sum of the content lengths of ALL the columns in a given row. I should add that all the columns in question are VARCHARS.

Yes, I know I could do this by fetching the entire row as

SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE *condition*

collapsing the resulting row contents into a string and getting the length of that string but I was wondering if there isn’t a more efficient one liner to do the job. Any tips would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, I prefer to use CHAR_LENGTH over LENGTH

SELECT CHAR_LENGTH(CONCAT(col1,col2,col3)) 
FROM tableName 
WHERE...

From the linked question

LENGTH() returns the length of the string measured in bytes.

CHAR_LENGTH() returns the length of the string measured in characters.