Wrong forum!!! character string buffer too small problem

Question

Hi,
I'm using a pl/sql procedure which builds a string held by a VARCHAR2 variable, however i've just discovered that in certain situations this string exceeds 2000 characters and i get this error:-
ORA-20500: ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character string buffer too small
How can i stop this from happening. Do i need to use another datatype??
PROCEDURE p_build_string(p_string_to_build IN OUT VARCHAR2
,p_string_to_add IN VARCHAR2
,p_delimiter IN VARCHAR2) IS
BEGIN
/* initialise string */
IF INSTR(p_string_to_add,'''') <> 0 THEN
IF p_string_to_build IS NULL THEN
p_string_to_build := ''''||REPLACE(p_string_to_add,'''','''''')||'''';
l_number_of_string_items := 1;
ELSE
p_string_to_build := p_string_to_build||p_delimiter||''''||REPLACE(p_string_to_add,'''','''''')||'''';
l_number_of_string_items := l_number_of_string_items + 1;
END IF;
ELSE
IF p_string_to_build IS NULL THEN
p_string_to_build := ''''||p_string_to_add||'''';
l_number_of_string_items := 1;
ELSE
p_string_to_build := p_string_to_build||p_delimiter||''''||p_string_to_add||'''';
l_number_of_string_items := l_number_of_string_items + 1;
END IF;
END IF;
dbms_output.put_line(l_number_of_string_items || ' ' ||p_string_to_build);
END;
Message was edited by:
david_wood

Answer 1

I'm not suggesting this is your problem, but
select status
into v_status,
from registration_offender_xref But you have declared
      v_status  varchar2(10);Much better to declare things like this
      v_status  registration_offender_xref.status%type;That way you know your variable is declared with a proper length, if the column length ever changes ... your code doesn't go kaboom.
Cheers,