Hi Johannes:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 01:50:47PM +0100, Johannes Schlüter wrote:
>
> unsigned long length
>
> The width of the field. This corresponds to the display length,
> in bytes.
>
> The server determines the length value before it generates the
> result set, so this is the minimum length required for a data
> type capable of holding the largest possible value from the
> result column, without knowing in advance the actual values that
> will be produced by the query for the result set.
>
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/c-api-data-structures.html
Pardon me for looping back around to this old discussion. I had a
moment to look at this in PEAR::DB the other day. A new perspective
came to mind...
It seems the field length in the C API is there to aid C programmers
with memory allocation.
The field length in PHP is there for PHP programmers to reverse engineer
database structures.
These are different purposes and the output should reflect such.
For example, the userland PHP field length could lead to someone dumping
a structure that has a VARCHAR(10). The exported metadata would say
VARCHAR(30). Then it gets imported and dumped again, and now we're up
to VARCHAR(90). Not fun.
Thanks for your reconsideration,
--Dan
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