LENGTH of TEXT columns

Hello All I am trying to pull out TEXT data from a 7.31 database into a flat file using Java. I notice that the text being pulled out is incomplete. However, the number of characters in the file is exactly equal to the value returned by doing a SELECT LENGTH (textcol) FROM table WHERE condition, so obviously the driver is referring to that value when it decides how much to pull out. Do you think an update statistics would correct the value for the length? Has anyone seen this kind of thing happen before, and if so, what needed to be done. I would have run the update stats first and checked before I asked, but I am not the DBA on the system. TIA Sujit