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Overview

The text data type is a UTF8-encoded text with Unicode support, which stores a sequence of characters (text).

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Examples

Let’s create an employee table with a text data type in each column:

CREATE TABLE employee (
    employeeName text,
    employeeDept text,
    employeeRole text
);
INSERT INTO employee (employeeName, employeeDept, employeeRole)
VALUES ('John','Finance','Staff'),
       ('Maya','Product','Staff'),
       ('Jane','Finance','Staff'),
       ('Phil','HR','Manager');
Insert the text value between the single quotes ’ ’.

The created table is shown below:

+---------------+---------------+---------------+
| employeename  | employeedept  | employeerole  |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+
| John          | Finance       | Staff         |
| Maya          | Product       | Staff         |
| Jane          | Finance       | Staff         |
| Phil          | HR            | Manager       |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+

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Text With SUBSTR Function

The substr() function extracts a specific number of characters from a text.

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Syntax

substr( text, start_position, length )

Let’s analyze the above syntax:

  • textis the specified text.
  • start_position is used as the starting position, specifying the part from which the substring will be returned. It is written as an int value.
  • length is used to determine the number of characters to be extracted. It can be one or more characters.
The first position in the text is 1.

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Example

Insert a value into the text column.

SELECT substr('Watermelon',6,5) AS "Fruit";

The updated table is shown below:

+-------------+
| Fruit       |    
+-------------+
| melon       |
+-------------+

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Text With LENGTH Function

The length() function returns the number of characters in a text.

The number of characters might be different from the byte length.

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Syntax

The length function will take a text as a parameter.

LENGTH (text);

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Example

Insert a value into the text column.

SELECT LENGTH ('UNITED STATES');

The updated table is shown below.

+---------+
| f       |
+---------+
| 13      | 
+---------+
The length() function will also count spaces.