Validación compleja

[paranoic]

Contar caracteres mysql tiene la funcion
CHAR_LENGTH(str) o LENGTH(str)

CHAR_LENGTH(str) Returns the length of the string str, measured in characters.
A multi-byte character counts as a single character.
This means that for a string containing five two-byte characters,
LENGTH() returns 10, whereas CHAR_LENGTH() returns
5.
E insisto no hace falta tanto codigo y tantas queries, un solo SELECT es capaz. Yo consultaria la bibliografia e MySQL o en su defecto intentaria usar un constructor e consultas como EMS.