inserting data into Oracle tables

Is there a standard for inserting data into Oracle tables from a user input field in PHP? Most Oracle tables will have a limit on the amount characters such as Name VARCHAR2(60 BYTE) - this means the maximum amount of characters allowed is 60. If you use special characters in PHP such as entering the following into a input box ¬!"£$%^&*()_+{}@~<>?|\,./;'#][=-¦abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzA When this gets passed to Oracle it takes the overall characters in the insert statement to 64, which then fails because it is over the Oracle table limit. Is there a standard way of dealing with something like this. Regards, David ---------------------------------- David Skyers Support Analyst Management Systems, UCL d.skyers@ucl.ac.uk 020 7679 1849 (internal 41849)