title: Laravel 4 Encryption: how many characters to expect
body: <p>I've just had an interesting little problem. </p>
  
  <p>Using Laravel 4, I encrypt some entries before adding them to a db, including email address. </p>
  
  <p>The db was setup with the default <code>varchar</code> length of 255. </p>
  
  <p>I've just had an entry that encrypted to 309 characters, blowing up the encryption by cutting off the last 50-odd characters in the db.</p>
  
  <p>I've (temporarily) fixed this by simply increasing the <code>varchar</code> length to 500, which should - in theory - cover me from this, but I want to be sure. </p>
  
  <p>I'm not sure how the encryption works, but is there a way to tell what maximum character length to expect from the encrypt output for the sake of setting my database? </p>
  
  <p>Should I change my field type from <code>varchar</code> to something else to ensure this doesn't happen again?</p>