How to treat a CHAR like a VARCHAR

How to treat a CHAR like a VARCHAR

If you need to have the length of actual text (not spaces) of a row in a CHAR column returned in char format. This is particularly handy when concatinating data together with a value containing its length. I found it useful for writing from a trigger to a table including the length of the data. It has been tested on DB2 V7 for OS/390. This tip is based upon work by David Corrigan. 

'EMAIL ADDRESS IS '||
STRIP(CHAR(LENGTH(RTRIM(EMAIL_ADDR))),B)
' CHARACTERS LONG'

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This was first published in December 2002

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