querying WHERE condition to character length?

I have a database with a large number of words but i want to select only those records where the character length is equal to a given number (in example case 3):

$query = ("SELECT * FROM $db WHERE conditions AND length = 3");

But this does not work... can someone show me the correct query?

Sorry, I wasn't sure which SQL platform you're talking about:

In MySQL:

$query = ("SELECT * FROM $db WHERE conditions AND LENGTH(col_name) = 3");

in MSSQL

$query = ("SELECT * FROM $db WHERE conditions AND LEN(col_name) = 3");

The LENGTH() (MySQL) or LEN() (MSSQL) function will return the length of a string in a column that you can use as a condition in your WHERE clause.

Edit

I know this is really old but thought I'd expand my answer because, as Paulo Bueno rightly pointed out, you're most likely wanting the number of characters as opposed to the number of bytes. Thanks Paulo.

So, for MySQL there's the CHAR_LENGTH(). The following example highlights the difference between LENGTH() an CHAR_LENGTH():

CREATE TABLE words (
	word VARCHAR(100)
) ENGINE INNODB DEFAULT CHARSET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

INSERT INTO words(word) VALUES('快樂'), ('happy'), ('hayır');

SELECT word, LENGTH(word) as num_bytes, CHAR_LENGTH(word) AS num_characters FROM words;

+--------+-----------+----------------+
| word   | num_bytes | num_characters |
+--------+-----------+----------------+
| 快樂    |         6 |              2 |
| happy  |         5 |              5 |
| hayır  |         6 |              5 |
+--------+-----------+----------------+

Be careful if you're dealing with multi-byte characters.

I think you want this:

select *
from dbo.table
where DATALENGTH(column_name) = 3

SELECT *
   FROM   my_table
   WHERE  substr(my_field,1,5) = "abcde";