stringlength

Stringlength is a general term for the length of a string, but the unit and method used to count can vary by language and encoding. It often refers to the number of elements used to represent the string, such as bytes, code units, or code points, rather than user-perceived characters. Because encodings differ (for example UTF-8 vs UTF-16) and because some characters are composed from multiple units, the same text can have different reported lengths in different contexts.

Language-specific notes help avoid common pitfalls. In C, strlen returns the number of bytes before a null terminator, not the number of characters, and it is not Unicode-aware. In JavaScript, the length property counts UTF-16 code units, so characters outside the basic multilingual plane or surrogate pairs may be counted as two. To count actual code points, you can use spreading or Array.from, or iterate with for...of. In Python 3, len(s) returns the number of Unicode code points. In Java and C#, String.length returns the number of UTF-16 code units; counting actual characters requires code point awareness. In Go, len(s) gives the byte length of a UTF-8 string, so to count runes you would convert to []rune. In PHP, strlen returns byte length, while mb_strlen handles multibyte encodings.

Practical guidance: choose the definition that matches your goal. For user-perceived length, consider grapheme clusters and appropriate Unicode-aware libraries, since counting by bytes or code units may misrepresent the actual length of text as seen by users.