I recently found myself working on a project that required managing a variety of terms in a MySQL database. The database had a table named ‘terms’, where each term was stored in a column called ‘name’. At one point, I needed to fetch all entries where the term consisted of exactly 2 characters. Here’s how I tackled this interesting problem using MySQL.
The CHAR_LENGTH Function
The solution lay in the handy CHAR_LENGTH
function provided by MySQL. This function returns the character length of a given string, making it a breeze to filter out terms based on length. Here’s the query I crafted to solve the problem:
SELECT * FROM terms WHERE CHAR_LENGTH(name) = 2;
This query was exactly what I needed – it returned all rows from the ‘terms’ table where the ‘name’ column had a string length of 2 characters. This experience showcased the simplicity and power of MySQL, making the task of filtering data by character length an easy one!