Hi - it's a reasonable question. I found Mathias's comment.
What I'm getting back is the full path name of the missing resource. And since I'm nesting resources and using 64-bit uuids in resource names this is way over 64 characters.
I'm using the exist xml database but I have no (easy) way to control it's responses. Of course if I don't ask for what's not there, the problem doesn't manifest itself and theoretically i know what is there but "somebody else" might have deleted it.
From my reading of the second post, the 31 characters is not a defined standard, merely the largest standard message, and no defined maximum.
Since the eXist database is only serving my application on a local net my easiest solution is just to up the count.