EXPERT RESPONSE
To answer your first question you actually need to know the answer to the
second question. To determine the length of the contents of a long
datatyped column, simply use the LENGTH function. The LENGTH function
returns an integer which is the total number of characters stored in that
column. For instance, if I had a column that had the following phrase
stored in it: 'Just do it!' If I used the LENGTH function to determine the
number of characters (LENGTH(my_long_col)), I'd get back 11.
Now, once you have how many characters the long column contains, you can
then concatenate the two columns as follows: my_varchar2_col ||
substr(my_long_col,1,length(my_long_col)). This works very nicely in
PL/SQL.
I'll caution you that there may be instances where this won't work well (or
at all) if the size of the data stored in the long column really is l-o-n-g
(over 4000 bytes). In that case, you'll have to do a bit more work but it's
still possible. If this is your situation, drop me another note back and
I'll try to expand on this topic further. In the meantime, I hope this much
helps!
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