Question

Why is the last character of each row trimmed after updating the dataset from the database?

Answer

The issue of the last character being trimmed from each row after updating the dataset from the database is commonly encountered when dealing with character data types. This problem arises due to the limitations of the varchar data type, particularly in scenarios involving multibyte character sets.

The varchar data type is designed to store variable-length character data, but it operates based on byte counts rather than character counts. In many character sets, especially those supporting multibyte characters like UTF-8, certain characters may require more than one byte to represent. When data is stored in varchar columns, the storage space allocated is based on byte count rather than character count.

It is recommended to use the nvarchar data type instead of varchar. Unlike varchar, nvarchar is designed to store Unicode character data, and it allocates storage space based on the number of characters rather than bytes. This ensures that multibyte characters are properly preserved without the risk of truncation.