Re: utf8 column is storing only half of the maximum number of characters

[Rick James]

Puzzling.
MySQL will not preallocate any amount of space for VARCHAR(4000), but will truncate any inserts to 4000 _characters_ (not "bytes").
A utf8 character (in MySQL) will occupy 1-3 bytes. Hence, the VARCHAR(4000) will occupy 4002 bytes for 4000 ascii chars; 1202 bytes for 4000 Asian characters. The extra 2 is for length.

Perhaps something else is going on. What are the values for
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';
I would hope that most are "utf8", not "latin1".

> I discovered that only the first 2000 characters (i.e. one-half the character limit) are being stored.
How did you discover that? (The technique you used for discovering it may be part of the problem!)

More on charset problems:
http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll
(But, I am sure it does not have an _explicit_ answer for your problem.)