character fields in records_in_range

[Timothy P Clark]

Hi,

We're trying to figure out the best way to determine a key field's 
non-padded length in records_in_range().

Our storage engine (IBM DB2) stores key values in a format that is 
different from MySQL's. One consequence of this is that we need to be able 
to determine in handler::records_in_range() the true length of a padded 
character field in a key. An example of a query which generates a padded 
character field in the key would be: select * from t1 where keyA like 
"ABC%". For this query, we need to be able to know in records_in_range() 
that there are exactly 3 characters in the key describing the lower bound. 
As far as I can tell, this information is not available explicitly in any 
data structure available to records_in_range().

Therefore, we need to analyze the key field data to determine the length. 
This appears simple for single-byte or double-byte character sets, because 
we can use a function like memchr() to search for the first occurrence of 
the CHARSET_INFO::min_sort_char in the field. This is what we are 
currently doing. However, from looking at the various my_like_range_* 
functions in ./strings/ it appears that this strategy cannot be applied to 
multi-byte character sets, such as cp932 or utf8. In fact, it looks like 
we almost have to reverse-engineer each implementation of my_like_range to 
produce a complementary function that can determine when padding starts. 
Obviously, we would prefer a solution that is more maintainable and more 
easily implemented. Do we have any options?

Thank you,
Tim Clark