Automatically clip strings to the proper length on insert

Question

I have a table with various VARCHAR fields in MySQL. I would like to insert some user data from a form via PHP. Obviously if I know the field lengths in PHP, I can limit the

Answer 1

you could query information_schema to get the lenght of the column and use that data to truncate before insert, but that's more overhead than necessary. just turn off strict SQL mode for this statement:

SET @prev_mode = @@sql_mode;
SET sql_mode = '';
INSERT blah....;
SET sql_mode = @prev_mode;