If you're chopping a diacritic off, you're changing meaning. If you're chopping an emoji off with a dangling ZWJ, you've potentially got an invalid character. D

If you're chopping a diacritic off, you're changing meaning. If you're chopping an emoji off with a dangling ZWJ, you've potentially got an invalid character. Depending on the language and text, you might be completely changing the meaning of what you're storing. Your database might be grumpy otherwise, but that doesn't make arbitrary truncation correct. This is an issue with your schema, it doesn't mean truncation is the best solution.