Find the length of the longest row in a column in oracle

Question

Does anybody know if there is a way to find what the length of the longest row in a column in Oracle?

Basically I need to get the length of the longest row and then use that length plus 1 with SUBSTR to make the output of the column one character longer than the longest string.

Thanks

EDIT:

Thanks for the advice.

However, the MAX(LENGTH(column_name)) AS MAXLENGTH approach gives me the number I want but when I try to use it with SUBSTR(column_name,1, MAXLENGTH) I get an invalid identifier error.

SO I made a function to return the numberI wanted then used:

SUBSTR(column_name,1,maxlengthfunc) 

This gave me the following output:

SUBSTR(NAME,1,MAXLENGTHFUNC) 

Rather than:

SUBSTR(NAME, 1, 19) 

And it didn't shrink the output column size like I needed.

Also

RTRIM(name)||' ' 

didn't do anything for me in SQL developer.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This will work with VARCHAR2 columns.

select max(length(your_col)) from your_table / 

CHAR columns are obviously all the same length. If the column is a CLOB you will need to use DBMS_LOB.GETLENGTH(). If it's a LONG it's really tricky.

Answer 2

SELECT max(length(col_name)+1) as MyOutput FROM table_Name 

Normal output would look like

   MyOutput 1     5 

New output would look like

   MyOutput 1     6