Categories:: String & binary functions (General)

BIT_LENGTH¶

Returns the length of a string or binary value in bits.

Snowflake doesn’t use fractional bytes so length is always calculated as 8 * OCTET_LENGTH.

Syntax¶

BIT_LENGTH(<string_or_binary>)

Arguments¶

string_or_binary: The string or binary value for which the length is returned.

Examples¶

This shows use of the BIT_LENGTH function on both string and BINARY values:

CREATE TABLE bl (v VARCHAR, b BINARY);
INSERT INTO bl (v, b) VALUES 
   ('abc', NULL),
   ('\u0394', X'A1B2');

Query the data:

SELECT v, b, BIT_LENGTH(v), BIT_LENGTH(b) FROM bl ORDER BY v;
+-----+------+---------------+---------------+
| V   | B    | BIT_LENGTH(V) | BIT_LENGTH(B) |
|-----+------+---------------+---------------|
| abc | NULL |            24 |          NULL |
| Δ   | A1B2 |            16 |            16 |
+-----+------+---------------+---------------+