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0.10 (stable)
Text Types

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: 2024-03-19