"Data too long for column" - why?

Question

I've written a MySQL script to create a database for hypothetical hospital records and populate it with data. One of the tables, Department, has a column named Description, which is declared as type varchar(200). When executing the INSERT command for Description I get an error:

error 1406: Data too long for column 'Description' at row 1.

All the strings I'm inserting are less than 150 characters.

Here's the declaration:

CREATE TABLE Department(     ...     Description varchar(200)     ...); 

And here's the insertion command:

INSERT INTO Department VALUES (..., 'There is some text here',...), (..., 'There is some more text over here',...); 

By all appearances, this should be working. Anyone have some insight?

Answer 1

Change column type to LONGTEXT