strlength

Lengths of strings

Syntax

L = strlength(str)

Description

L = strlength(str) returns the number of characters in str.

Examples

Number of Characters in String Scalar

Starting in R2017a, you can create a string using double quotes. The result is a 1-by-1 string array, or string scalar.

str = "Hello, World"

str = 
"Hello, World"

Return the number of characters in str.

L = strlength(str)

L = 12

Length of Each String in String Array

Create a string array using the [] operator. str is a 2-by-3 string array that contains six strings.

str = ["Amis","Chekhov","Joyce";"Stein","","Proust"]

str = 2x3 string
    "Amis"     "Chekhov"    "Joyce" 
    "Stein"    ""           "Proust"

Find the length of each string in str. Use strlength, not length, to determine the number of characters in each element of a string array.

L = strlength(str)

L = 2×3

     4     7     5
     5     0     6

Number of Characters in Character Vector

Create a character vector. To return the number of characters in the character vector, use the strlength function.

chr = 'The rain in Spain.'

chr = 
'The rain in Spain.'

L = strlength(chr)

L = 18

Input Arguments

str — Input text

string array | character vector | cell array of character vectors

Input text, specified as a string array, a character vector, or a cell array of character vectors.

Tips

• To find the length of the largest array dimension of str, use the length function, not strlength.

Algorithms

strlength counts the number of code units in text. Code units are bit sequences for encoding characters of a character encoding system. In some character encodings, such as UTF-16, there are some characters that are encoded with multiple code units.

If you have a string or a character vector that contains such characters, then the number of code units is greater than the number of characters.

length(C) also returns the number of code units when C is a character vector.

Extended Capabilities

Tall Arrays

Calculate with arrays that have more rows than fit in memory.

This function fully supports tall arrays. For more information, see Tall Arrays.

C/C++ Code Generation
Generate C and C++ code using MATLAB® Coder™.

Distributed Arrays

Partition large arrays across the combined memory of your cluster using Parallel Computing Toolbox™.

This function fully supports distributed arrays. For more information, see Run MATLAB Functions with Distributed Arrays (Parallel Computing Toolbox).