CHAR

Description

The CHAR function interprets each argument as an integer and returns a string consisting of the characters represented by those integer code values.

Syntax

CHAR(<expr>[, <expr> ...] [USING <charset_name>])

Parameters

Parameter	Description
<expr>	Integer code value to be converted to a character. Type: INT

Return Value

Returns VARCHAR type, a string composed of characters corresponding to the argument integer code values.

Special cases:

• If any argument is NULL, returns an empty string
• If the result string is illegal for the given character set, returns NULL
• Arguments greater than 255 are converted to multi-byte characters. For example, CHAR(15049882) is equivalent to CHAR(229, 164, 154)

Examples

1. Basic usage: ASCII character generation

SELECT CHAR(68, 111, 114, 105, 115);

+--------------------------------------+
| char('utf8', 68, 111, 114, 105, 115) |
+--------------------------------------+
| Doris                                |
+--------------------------------------+

2. Multi-byte UTF-8 characters (Chinese)

SELECT CHAR(15049882, 15179199, 14989469);

+--------------------------------------------+
| char('utf8', 15049882, 15179199, 14989469) |
+--------------------------------------------+
| 多睿丝                                     |
+--------------------------------------------+

3. Illegal character returns NULL

SELECT CHAR(255);

+-------------------+
| char('utf8', 255) |
+-------------------+
| NULL              |
+-------------------+

4. NULL value handling

SELECT CHAR(NULL);

+------------+
| CHAR(NULL) |
+------------+
|            |
+------------+