Selecting Data by String Length in MySQL

To sort data based on string length in MySQL, instead of using string_length(column), consider using the built-in CHAR_LENGTH() function.

Difference between CHAR_LENGTH() and LENGTH()

• CHAR_LENGTH(): Returns the number of characters in a string, considering multi-byte character encoding (e.g., UTF-8).
• LENGTH(): Returns the number of bytes occupied by a string, which may not accurately reflect character count in multi-byte encodings.

Using CHAR_LENGTH()

To sort data by string length using CHAR_LENGTH(), you can use the following syntax:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY CHAR_LENGTH(column);

This query will retrieve all rows from the specified table and sort them in ascending order based on the character length of the specified column. Rows with longer strings will appear towards the bottom of the results.