How to Get the Length of a String in MySQL

08/05/2021

Contents

In this article, you will learn how to get the length of a string in MySQL.

Getting the length of a string in MySQL

In MySQL, you can use the LENGTH() function to get the length of a string. The LENGTH() function returns the number of characters in a string, including spaces.

Syntax

LENGTH(str);

Examples

Here are some examples of using the LENGTH() function in MySQL:

Getting the length of a string

To get the length of a string, you can use the LENGTH() function.

Syntax
SELECT LENGTH(str);
Example
SELECT LENGTH('Hello World');

Output:

+----------------+
| LENGTH('Hello World') |
+----------------+
|             11 |
+----------------+

In this example, the LENGTH() function returns the length of the string ‘Hello World’, which is 11.

Getting the length of a column value

You can also use the LENGTH() function to get the length of a column value.

Syntax
SELECT LENGTH(column_name) FROM table_name;
Example
SELECT LENGTH(name) FROM employees;

Output:

+--------------+
| LENGTH(name) |
+--------------+
|           7 |
|           5 |
|           9 |
|          10 |
+--------------+

In this example, the LENGTH() function returns the length of the name column in the employees table.

Using the length of a string in a WHERE clause

You can use the LENGTH() function in a WHERE clause to filter records based on the length of a string.

Syntax
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE LENGTH(column_name) = length_value;
Example
SELECT * FROM employees WHERE LENGTH(name) = 7;

Output:

+----+----------+--------+--------+
| id | name     | salary | hire_date |
+----+----------+--------+--------+
| 1  | John     | 50000  | 2020-01-01 |
| 3  | Michael | 60000  | 2020-02-01 |
+----+----------+--------+--------+

In this example, the SELECT statement returns all the records from the employees table where the length of the name column is equal to 7.

#MySQL