field lengths?

I noticed that when I was going from HL7 to XML in a translation, the field lengths didn’t really matter. I had test data where there were 100 characters in a 10 character field and it still worked.

So I am wondering if I need to get the field length specifications from the Client, or if it doesn’t really matter.

Perhaps field lengths are only used when the output of the XLATE is HL7?