How to get size in bytes of a CLOB column in Oracle?

clob, oracle, sql

Solution

After some thinking i came up with this solution:

 LENGTHB(TO_CHAR(SUBSTR(<CLOB-Column>,1,4000)))

`SUBSTR` returns only the first 4000 characters (max string size)

`TO_CHAR` converts from `CLOB` to `VARCHAR2`

`LENGTHB` returns the length in Bytes used by the string.

Problem

How do I get the size in bytes of a `CLOB` column in Oracle? `LENGTH()` and `DBMS_LOB.getLength()` both return number of characters used in the `CLOB` but I need to know how many bytes are used (I'm dealing with multibyte charactersets).

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