>The way I see it the ones they use are for fields of undetermined length (ie: may exceed 255 chars). When your building a system like they are doing it is what is needed -- especially since some hold binary data, etc. I was under the impression you were using them to hold stuff like text that you know is less then 255 chars. If I mistook you -- whoops! Sorry!
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>Of course what I mentioned was my opinion only & is the way I look at things.
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I've seen you get a few right answers here...

I was wanting to store chunks of text to go into HTML files and also filenames.

It just made sense to have elastic fields, why did they make them if they are not reliable?