Thanks heaps Adam. Cleared it up perfectly. On 12/7/06, Adam Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > You're just confused, although this is not helped by me typing faster > than I was thinking, in my descriptions of the bit-usage of UTF-8, etc > (sorry, I'm @ work so was only paying 50% attention to what I was > typing). Better not to rely on me in this case, but to read this lot: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Transformation_Format > > Anyway, to answer your question: > > If you use "bytes" and specify varchar2(2000), you'll get 2000 bytes of > storage space for each row in that column. That's obvious. > > If you use "chars" and specify varchar2(2000), you'll get 2000x > [whatever the size of the char could be, for the given encoding you're > using for that column]. If it's a 4-byte character encoding, the > varchar2(2000) will be 8000 BYTES long (4x2000). > > So if you use chars and say "2000, pls": you can definitely fit 2000 > characters in there. If you specify 2000 bytes... you'll be able to > fit 2000 bytes worth of characters, which given a UTF-8 character can > be 1-4 bytes each, will quite possibly be fewer than 2000 chars. > > Basically the "byte semantics" comes from back in the day when we only > ever thought about english-language characters, which fitted nicely > into 7 bits, so one byte = one char worked nicely. Now that we deal > with all sorts of different alphabets, the space needed to store a > character also varies, so trying to use a byte as a character unit > doesn't make sense, hence the character-based "semantics". > > I'd be more inclined to use "characters" than "bytes". > > -- > Adam > > -- > Adam > > > > >
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