how to get max length of variable?

[jholder]

All,
I'm not having any luck searching for this question. Is there a way to find the maximum length of a variable in PL/SQL (ORA 9i).

For instance:

sample VARCHAR2(75);

I would like to return the value 75.

I thought perhaps this would work, but no luck.

LENGTH(sample%TYPE);

and LENGTH(sample) only returns the length of the string itself, not what the maximum could be. and MAXLENGTH doesn't seem to exist.

Thanks in advance.

--james

[LKBrwn_DBA]

What's wrong with looking at the source code?