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In DuckDB, strings can be stored in the VARCHAR
field.
The field allows storage of Unicode characters. Internally, the data is encoded as UTF-8.
Name | Aliases | Description |
---|---|---|
VARCHAR |
CHAR , BPCHAR , STRING , TEXT |
Variable-length character string |
VARCHAR(n) |
STRING(n) , TEXT(n) |
Variable-length character string. The maximum length n has no effect and is only provided for compatibility. |
Specifying a Length Limit
Specifying the length for the VARCHAR
, STRING
, and TEXT
types is not required and has no effect on the system. Specifying the length will not improve performance or reduce storage space of the strings in the database. These variants variant is supported for compatibility reasons with other systems that do require a length to be specified for strings.
If you wish to restrict the number of characters in a VARCHAR
column for data integrity reasons the CHECK
constraint should be used, for example:
CREATE TABLE strings (
val VARCHAR CHECK (length(val) <= 10) -- val has a maximum length of 10
);
The VARCHAR
field allows storage of Unicode characters. Internally, the data is encoded as UTF-8.
Formatting Strings
Strings in DuckDB are surrounded by single quote (apostrophe) characters ('
):
SELECT 'Hello world' AS msg;
msg |
---|
Hello world |
To include a single quote character in a string, use ''
:
SELECT 'Hello ''world''' AS msg;
msg |
---|
Hello ‘world’ |
Strings with Special Characters
To use special characters in string, use escape string literals or dollar-quoted string literals. Alternatively, you can use concatenation and the chr
character function:
SELECT 'Hello' || chr(10) || 'world' AS msg;
┌──────────────┐
│ msg │
│ varchar │
├──────────────┤
│ Hello\nworld │
└──────────────┘
Double Quote Characters
Double quote characters ("
) are used to denote table and column names. Surrounding their names allows the use of keywords, e.g.:
CREATE TABLE "table" ("order" BIGINT);
While DuckDB occasionally accepts both single quote and double quotes for strings (e.g., both FROM "filename.csv"
and FROM 'filename.csv'
work), their use is not recommended.
Functions
See Character Functions and Pattern Matching.
About this page
Last modified: 2024-03-28