CHARACTER_LENGTH

A general SQL function that returns the number of characters in a string expression.

Synopsis


CHARACTER_LENGTH(string-expression)

Arguments

string-expression

A string expression, which can be the name of a column, a string literal, or the result of another scalar function, where the underlying data type can be represented as any character type (such as CHAR or VARCHAR).

Description

CHARACTER_LENGTH returns an integer that denotes the number of characters, not the number of bytes, of the given string expression, including trailing blanks and the string-termination character. Note that the return value of a NULL string is NULL.

Example

This example returns the number of characters in the names of the LastName column in the Employees table:

SELECT CHARACTER_LENGTH(LastName) 
     FROM Employees