What is the Maximum length of "about me" in the Stack Exchange API?
The one from the /me path.
And in general, where are the length limits published? If anywhere?
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1 Answer
The payload seems to be limited to 3000 characters by the Stack Exchange engine itself:
However, the actual field returned by the API may be longer, as the user's 3000, markdown characters are expanded into HTML.
As stated in "Can we have maximum length of string in API help pages?", the API itself enforces no length limits on the data and...
we're not giving hard guarantees as to the maximum length of strings returned.
That question introduced the suggested_buffer_size field in the self-documentation, but (A) that was just a suggestion and (B) the suggested_buffer_size field seems to have been dropped from the current version of the API.
So, there are no length limits published, and length is limited by the underlying SE engine, not by the API.
answered Jun 11, 2013 at 19:03
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My app stores the about me in a database column, so I think I will go ahead and truncate these to 3500 before putting it in my nvarchar(3500) column. Commented Jun 11, 2013 at 19:27
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Sounds reasonable-ish. There is a chance that you'll clip somebody's entry though. Converting markup to HTML can often double the length. For example the user enters
http://some_server.com/some/long/path?qryStr=blah#someAnchor(60 chars), but you see<a href="http://some_server.com/some/long/path?qryStr=blah#someAnchor">http://some_server.com/some/long/path?qryStr=blah#someAnchor</a>(135 chars). Commented Jun 11, 2013 at 19:48 -
Hmmm. Yeah that's what I'm afraid of. I don't want the column to be too big as it will eat up a crap load of space. Commented Jun 12, 2013 at 12:25