Calculating the length of a string is a very simple thing to do in most programming languages. It is an action that you will find yourself needing to perform very often. Be it for validation, reporting or comparisons, knowing how to find how many characters a piece of text has using code is incredibly useful.
To start out, I have created an online tool that will calculate the length of a string for you. If you want to paste a piece of text into the box above, it will allow you to see how many characters were in this. String length methods will all include whitespace as a character, so keep this in mind when working with any code and methods that perform this function.
The tool above will give you a quick answer to your immediate problem. If you are looking to implement a solution for your own project, the answers below will show you how to count the number of characters in a string using various programming languages.
Using string.length in C# & .NET
C# is a language that is part of the .NET framework by Microsoft. It is a widely used framework due to it being so tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem and because it is a powerful and easy language to work with. Calculating the length of a string in C# can be done very easily. The string object contains a length method that will return the number of characters the string contains.
string myString = "Get the number of characters in this text"; int myStringLength = myString.Length;
Using string.length in Java
The syntax of Java and C# is very similar. The code to get the length of a string in Java is slightly different due to the number of characters being exposed through a property in C# when this is not the case in Java. Both are incredibly easy though. The code snippet below will show you the java code you need to write this.
string myString = "Use java to calculate how long a string is"; int myStringLength = myString.length();
Using strlen in PHP
Php, while being a very useful programming language for websites, does a lot of things in a bit of a weird way. The amount of inconsistency between the function names is one issue, but this is easy to get around. Calculating the length of a string in PHP requires you to call a function that is built into the framework rather than an extension method of the object. Why is this? Because PHP is not an object-orientated language at its core. A string is not an object unless you explicitly make it one.
$myString = "How long is this piece of text?"; $myStringLength = strlen($myString);
Using string.length in Javascript
A website without javascript is a very rare event these days, in fact, the majority of websites will not even function without javascript support. Getting the length of a piece of text in Javascript is very easy. The syntax of the code for this is a lot like that of C#.
var myString = "getting the length of this text in Javascript"; var myStringLength = myString.length;
Using len in Python
Python is a scripting language that is most like PHP. In recent years, the language has taken a lot of the market share for scripting away from PHP. Getting the length of a string in Python is just as easy as it is in PHP. The code below will show you how to do it.
myString = "How many characters are in this string?" myStringLength = len(myString)
