Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Quickest way to find the length of a string?

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Quickest way to find the length of a string?

Anyone have a secret way they use to quickly find the length of a string? Say you have a web form that only takes n characters, and you want to be a jerk and use up the whole thing exactly. Or, maybe you have a db field of a certain length and you want to measure what kind of stuff fits in it.

Here's what I do. I open up EditPlus, hit ctrl+shift+n for a new HTML document, type:

<script>

document.write("foo".length)

</script>

between the <body> tags, and hit ctrl+b to open up EditPlus's internal browser so I can see it.

(Yes, I know just having <script> is invalid, but it doesn't matter for this)

Permalink | 6 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 4978

23:16 (utc-4)
edited: 23:17 (utc-4)

Comments

How about this: Ctrl-T to open a new tab, then javascript:"foo".length{return}.

∴ Phil Ringnalda | 26-Jun-2004 11:40pm est | http://philringnalda.com | #4873

Phil, that's awesome. Thanks!

∴ Keith | 27-Jun-2004 12:20am est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #4874

python -c 'print(len("foo"))'

That Python command line snippet didn't work for me. I'm not sure why... it's probably because I use Windows.

∴ Keith | 27-Jun-2004 10:59pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #4877

All the editors I use tell me the cursor position, so I move the cursor to the start of the string, look at the position counter, then move the cursor to the end of the string, and look at the position counter again.

∴ Alan Green | 28-Jun-2004 7:04pm est | http://cardboard.nu | #4882

Along the lines of Alans suggestion. In my editor (Textpad), I just highlight the text. The status bar in the app tells me the selected texts character count.

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