On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 05:42:12PM +0200, Zeugswetter Andreas SB SD wrote: > > Hackers, do you think it's possible to hack together a quick and dirty > > patch, so that string length is represented by one byte? IOW can a > > database be built that doesn't contain any char/varchar/text value > > longer than 255 characters in the catalog? > > Since he is only using fixchar how about doing a fixchar implemetation, that > does not store length at all ? It is the same for every row anyways !
Remember that in Unicode, 1 char != 1 byte. In fact, any encoding that's not Latin will have a problem. I guess you could put a warning on it: not for use for asian character sets. So what do you do if someone tries to insert such a string anyway? Perhaps a better approach is to vary the number of bytes used for the length. So one byte for lengths < 64, two bytes for lengths < 16384. Unfortunatly, two bits in the length are already used (IIRC) for other things making it a bit more tricky. -- Martijn van Oosterhout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that can do binary > arithmetic and those that can't. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]