TO_BYTES Argument Types and Rules - Teradata VantageCloud Lake

Expressions passed to this function must have the following data types:

instring = VARCHAR or CLOB
in_encoding = VARCHAR(64)

The character sets of two input parameters to TO_BYTES can be either Latin or Unicode.

If in_encoding is not one of the supported encodings, an error is returned.

If either instring or in_encoding is NULL, the result is NULL.

You can also pass arguments with data types that can be converted to the preceding types using the implicit data type conversion rules that apply to UDFs.

The UDF implicit type conversion rules are more restrictive than the implicit type conversion rules typically used by Vantage. An argument that cannot be converted to the required data type following the UDF implicit conversion rules must be explicitly cast.

The maximum input or output for CLOB or BLOB size is 2 GB. An error is reported if the size is exceeded.

The TO_BYTES function converts from a character string to a VARBYTE. The character strings are treated as positive unless there is an explicit negative sign. Byte strings are interpreted as negative if the high order bit is 1.

TO_BYTES must not be used for byte to byte encodings, because TO_BYTES tries to interpret the sign of the byte string.

If you must use byte to byte conversion, use the two TO_BYTE functions. (Note the syntax is TO_BYTE, not TO_BYTES.)