<p>Some OSM tags do not (always) fit into the 255-character-limit imposed by the OSM API. This is a feature request to either increase the limit or remove it altogether.</p>
<h3>Discussion</h3>
<p>There is a <a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2018-October/039889.html" rel="nofollow">discussion in the tagging mailing list right now</a> about how to deal with a very complicated opening hours which is too long to fit into one value.</p>
<p>Citing <a class="user-mention" data-hovercard-type="user" data-hovercard-url="/hovercards?user_id=1011860" data-octo-click="hovercard-link-click" data-octo-dimensions="link_type:self" href="https://github.com/simonpoole">@simonpoole</a> :</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have a number of keys for which the values can easily exceed 255 chars besides opening_hours, lane destinations and conditional restrictions are good candidates. Not to mention changeset tags. With other words it is a general problem which should be tackled with a general solution.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, we passed the point where value-lengths above 255 characters are unrealistic for structured data, data that is not prose.</p>
<h3>Solutions</h3>
<p>In the above discussion, the general opinion seemed to be that the OSM API will not change (until the unicorny API 0.7) and thus we have to workaround this.</p>
<p>There have been some suggestions towards a general-purpose syntax splitting up the actual value in different keys, like <code>opening_hours</code>, <code>opening_hours#2</code>, ... I think this is a very bad solution, because it requires <strong>each and every</strong> application and library that works with OSM data to implement this kind of tag concatenation - for any key, not just <code>opening_hours</code>, because this kind of enumeration scheme is supposed to be a generic solution</p>
<p>In <a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load issue title" data-id="244930200" data-permission-text="Issue title is private" data-url="https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1593" data-hovercard-type="issue" data-hovercard-url="/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1593/hovercard" href="https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1593">#1593</a>, I read that the limitation to 255 characters is actually a legacy from back when the OSM database was running on MySQL. So, removing that limitation, or increasing it somewhat, seems to be the swiftest solution because a weird workaround is avoided and it doesn't require a change in applications that use OSM data.<br>
The only change that should be done would be to remove/change the client-side checks for tag lengths (editors).</p>

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