LENGTH() and UTF-8

[Andreas Steichardt]

Hi!

We are storing UTF-8 data in out mysql database and we need to get the length 
of the data. But length() doesn't return the number of characters but the 
pure number of bytes.

SELECT LENGTH('köter') => 6

Currently we are doing something like that:

SELECT LENGTH(CONVERT('köter' USING 'ucs2'))/2;

This works fine but a "real" solution like CHAR_LENGTH() or something like 
that would be really apprectiated.

Kind regards,

 Andreas Streichardt