What field TYPE for textarea's?

Question

I have a form where clients will be typing a few paragraphs in various textarea's. Should I choose varchar or text for field type? Does it matter?

Thanks.

Erik

varchar to hold any alphanumeric or symbol characters they may type — squarephoenix, Apr 23 '12 at 20:42
What limits do you require the users' entries to be kept to? — David Thomas, Apr 23 '12 at 20:43
possible duplicate of [MySQL: Large VARCHAR vs. TEXT?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2023481/mysql-large-varchar-vs-text) — Explosion Pills, Apr 23 '12 at 20:45
a text area does not care but if you are storing it to a database you will have to make that distinction, what limits are you holding on the textarea's? — Drewdin, Apr 23 '12 at 20:45

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 27 '15 at 03:48

It depends on the possible length of text you accept. Text has no limitations at all, but that means you could end up with a giant, huge, ridiculous response size. On the other hand, if you're not worried about that, text is fine.

Varchar requires you to have some idea of how large you want the response to max out at, like 256, 1000, 4000 chars, for example. Any data above that is lost.

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 23 '12 at 20:44

6

For text that don't have a limit in size I normaly use text, and varchar when you have a maximum size defined.

answered Apr 23 '12 at 20:44

Gustavo Vargas

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 23 '12 at 20:46

1

Depends. Difference between varchar and text is that varchar is actually stored in row, when text is a pointer.

Varchar is mostly faster. Usually varchar is used when statement is not very long and has a limit. Text is used for large pieces of data.

answered Apr 23 '12 at 20:46

Ruslan Osipov

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What field TYPE for textarea's?

3 Answers3