Determining Size of Data

[Anon]

I have a mysql database with various large entries, what i wish to do is display the length of the the file contained within the database. For example, if i had a row that had
Article ID: 1
Article Title: Interesting Title
Article Body: This is a very long article

how would i work out how long the length in characters of the article body?

thanks
foobar2k

[harlan]

You could either do this using internal functions of mysql or extracting and looking at the size of the files with php.

What datatype are these articles in the database?

[Anon]

just plain text

[harlan]

you can do something along the lines of

SELECT id_column, LENGTH(article_column) FROM your_table ORDER by date_column, time_column;

that will pull out all the lengths of the articles.

[harlan]

once you have the length of each of the documents, you can do something along the lines of

if ($lengthofthisdocument < 1000)
echo "short document";
else
echo "Long document";