Regarding String truncation

Question

Hello all,
I have got a small problem. Hope you will help me.
I have got a text String which contains both single byte characters and multi-byte characters mixed up(English characters and non-english characters) which i need to insert into database table. Now the database column is set to store a text of maximum length of 100 bytes so it is required to truncate the string before insertion. Now the problem is when i extract the first 100 bytes from the string, the last character of the string sometimes gets changed( due to extracting only first byte of multi-byte character). The dumbest solution I thought to get around this is something like this:
                //Here remarks contains the string value
     if (null!= remarks && remarks.getBytes().length > 100 ) {
                      while (remarks.getBytes().length > 100) {
                           remarks = remarks.substring(0, remarks.length()-1 );
                 }I am wondering is there any other elegant solution for this as the loop part is time-consuming and moreover, i am inserting the records in a count of thousands.

Answer 1

Thanks for your reply
Why do you have to do that on your own? It's the databases task to correctly truncate a String, if necessary (and inform you of the fact by issuing a Warning).
But when i insert a string of size greater than 100 bytes i am getting an SQL Exception.
Also, is the size of the text field really restricted by the number of bytes instead of the number of characters? I've seen that in some DBs (can't remember which ones), but it's a pretty bad idea and fortunately not all do it that way.
I am using Oracle9i and the size of text field is restricted by the number of bytes.
Also, your code assumes that the database uses the same encoding as the default locale of the machine running your code. Workaround: find out the encoding of the Database and use that when calling getBytes().Points taken. Thanks.