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LEN (Transact-SQL)

  • Article
  • 05/16/2013

Returns the number of characters of the specified string expression, excluding trailing blanks.

Note

To return the number of bytes used to represent an expression, use the DATALENGTH function.

Topic link icon Transact-SQL Syntax Conventions

Syntax

LEN ( string_expression )

Arguments

  • string_expression
    Is the string expression to be evaluated. string_expression can be a constant, variable, or column of either character or binary data.

Return Types

bigint if expression is of the varchar(max), nvarchar(max) or varbinary(max) data types; otherwise, int.

If you are using SC collations, the returned integer value counts UTF-16 surrogate pairs as a single character. For more information, see Collation and Unicode Support.

Examples

The following example selects the number of characters and the data in FirstName for people located in Australia.

USE AdventureWorks2012;
GO
SELECT LEN(FirstName) AS Length, FirstName, LastName 
FROM Sales.vIndividualCustomer
WHERE CountryRegionName = 'Australia';
GO

See Also

Reference

Data Types (Transact-SQL)

String Functions (Transact-SQL)

DATALENGTH (Transact-SQL)

LEFT (Transact-SQL)

RIGHT (Transact-SQL)