The MySQL documentation says that starting with 5.0, varchar lengths refer to units of characters, not bytes. However, I recently ran into a problem when I received truncated data warnings when inserting values that should fit into the varchar columns that it designated.
I reproduced this problem with a simple table in version v5.1
mysql> show create table test\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: test
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `test` (
`string` varchar(10) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Then I inserted a few 10 characters with different numbers of UTF8 characters
mysql> insert into test (string) values
-> ('abcdefghij'),
-> ('ãáéíçãáéíç'),
-> ('ãáéíç67890'),
-> ('éíç4567890'),
-> ('íç34567890');
Query OK, 5 rows affected, 4 warnings (0.06 sec)
Records: 5 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 4
mysql> show warnings;
+---------+------+---------------------------------------------+
| Level | Code | Message |
+---------+------+---------------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for column 'string' at row 2 |
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for column 'string' at row 3 |
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for column 'string' at row 4 |
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for column 'string' at row 5 |
+---------+------+---------------------------------------------+
mysql> select * from test;
+------------+
| string |
+------------+
| abcdefghij |
| ãáéíç |
| ãáéíç |
| éíç4567 |
| íç345678 |
+------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)
I think this shows that the varchar size is still specified in bytes or at least not exact in units of characters.
The question is, do I understand the documentation correctly and is this a mistake? Or am I misinterpreting the documentation?
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