CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mysqlcharacter-encodingcollation
user1342336
user1342336

Reputation: 977

meaing of maxlen in INFORMATION_SCHEMA CHARACTER_SETS Table of MySQL

From mysql official website:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/character-sets-table.html

YOu will see this table definition.

Can anybody here tell what does 'maxlen' mean? max length of bytes for character encoding?

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 578

Answers (2)

didierc
didierc

Reputation: 14730

From the documentation:

The Maxlen column shows the maximum number of bytes required to store one character.

Upvotes: 1

Ed Gibbs
Ed Gibbs

Reputation: 26343

Based on the fact that all the maxlen values fall between 1 and 4, and that the ascii character set has maxlen=1, I'd say it's the maximum length in bytes for a character in the character set.

More proof: UTF8 has maxlen=3 and UTF16 has maxlen=4.

Remember that the maxlen is just that - a maximum. Some UTF16 characters will be less than 4 bytes.

Upvotes: 1

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