Length Preserving

With the Preserve Length flag enabled, the length of the input data and protected token value is the same.

For data elements with the Preserve Length flag available, you have an option to generate token values that are of the same length as the input data.

Note: The Unicode Gen2 token element is Code Point length preserving when this option is enabled. The length in bytes can vary depending on the alphabet selected during data element creation.

As an extension to this flag, the Allow Short Data flag provides multiple options to manage short input data handling. If the Preserve Length property is not set, then short input protected will not keep its original length. Generated tokens will at least have the minimum length defined for the token type.

For more information about short data tokenization, refer to Short Data Tokenization.

A check for maximum input length is performed regardless of the preservation setting. This check ensures that the input is within the allowed length limit.

If Preserve Length is not selected, then tokenized data may be longer than the input value up to +5%, or at least +1 symbol on a very small initial value (1-2 symbols). Here, symbol can represent a character or a code point.

If Preserve Length is not selected, then for applying protection in database columns, column length of the resulting protected table should be bigger than length of the column to tokenize in the initial table. This will allow inserting tokenized data during protection when tokenized data is longer than the input data.