Techniques for Managing Text Truncation

Text truncation is one of the more challenging aspects of working with fixed-width data formats. Since, by definition, our storage format is of a fixed length, any text we attempt to store that exceeds the size of any given field will not fit. Some systems will provide a warning when this is about to occur or even trigger a fatal error to prevent truncating data.

Let’s take a look at the table below, which contains some example data we will work to store in a limited data format: