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Frequently Used String Functions in MySQL

MySQL's built-in string-related functions can be used several ways. You can use functions in SELECT statements without specifying a table to retrieve a result of the function. Or you can use functions to enhance your SELECT results by concatenating two fields to form a new string.

Length and Concatenation Functions

The group of length and concatenation functions focuses on the length of strings and concatenating strings together. Length-related functions include LENGTH(), OCTET_LENGTH(), CHAR_LENGTH(), and CHARACTER_LENGTH(), which do virtually the same thing: count characters in a string.

							mysql> select length('This is cool!'); +-------------------------+ | LENGTH('This is cool!') | +-------------------------+ ...