Question

I want to do a front end control on the size of user inputs before they are loaded into a VARCHAR(1000) table. How should I do that given that I expect inputs in Latin and Asian character sets?

Answer 1

If your varchar field size is 1000. First don’t let user to type more than 1000 characters. You can control this from the front end.

If you have have a txtField you can use maxlenght

<input type="text" name="txtName" id="txtName" maxlength="1000" />

And if you use text area you can use following kind of code

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

function imposeMaxLength(Object, MaxLen)
{
  return (Object.value.length < MaxLen);
}

</script> 
<textarea name="txtxDesc" id="txtDesc" onkeypress="return imposeMaxLength(this, 1000);" ></textarea>

If you think advance user may cause problems by modifying DOM elements using tools. You have to validate this from server side as well using PHP.

if(strlen($_POST["txtxDesc"]) > 1000)
{
   echo "Text length is too much".
   exit;
}