Datatype who allows more than 256 characters into string

Question

I am new to Visual FoxPro and I am currently getting a string of characters longer than 256 and it shows this error, investigating varchar in VisualFox Pro there is no data type that can hold so much information.

Be able to host a string of more than 10,000 characters regardless of the type of symbol.

Answer 1

In VFP a character field can hold up to 254 characters. A varchar field's maximum size is also same (and under the covers a varchar field is a char field, occupying the same storage, just it is serviced as trimmed when you need it. My suggestion is to never use varchar).

The data type for strings larger than 254, up to 2 Gb is "memo". Note that 2 Gb limit is not for a single memo entry but for the total of all entries in a memo file (.fpt).

(Also there is the blob type which is also limited to 2 Gb. Don't get confused with it until you understand the slight differences, use a memo data type).

ie:

create table sampleTable (id int, largeStr m)
insert into sampleTable (id, largeStr) values ;
 (1, replicate('hello ', 1000))