How do you get the length of a string?

Question

How do you get the length of a string in jQuery?

Nabob

Excellent just use normal JS. – Nabob

Answer 1

You don't need jquery, just use yourstring.length. See reference here and also here.

Update:

To support unicode strings, length need to be computed as following:

[..."𠮷"].length

or create an auxiliary function

function uniLen(s) {
    return [...s].length
}

Rockie

I was too, oh the joys of SO. – Arenaceous

I bet that's just competition. :D – Emelyemelyne

Artem Barger -- probably because he asked about using Jquery. – Thibaud

Artem Barger - probably because he was looking for the same thing as I was: a way to get the length of text contained in an HTML tag. I'm a beginner so I knew how to get the content but not its length. In that sense, genesis' answer below is better. – Untimely

"𠮷".length == 2. How can we get the actual number of characters? – Bes

to make unicode aware lenght you need to run it following way: [..."𠮷"].length – Rockie

"You don't need jquery..." - that's not what the OP asked. – Quanta

Answer 2

The easiest way:

$('#selector').val().length

Reprint

the only answer that answers the question as asked. – Landgrabber

how is that? no where in the question does he say anything about the string coming from an :input value – Crossfertilization

so does this one: len = $('#selector').is('div') ? "someString".length : 0 and makes just as much sense... – Crossfertilization

but this still just uses javascript doesn't it? same as @Artem Barger's answer – Oxford

Answer 3

jQuery is a JavaScript library.

You don't need to use jQuery to get the length of a string because it is a basic JavaScript string object property.

somestring.length;

Rapturous

+1 for including the line 'jQuery is a JavaScript library.' Lots of answers are saying you don't need jQuery, but this may be confusing to a person who thinks that 'jQuery' and 'JavaScript' are two different things. – Greasepaint

Answer 4

HTML

<div class="selector">Text mates</div>

SCRIPT

alert(jQuery('.selector').text().length);

RESULT

10

Gardal

Answer 5

A somewhat important distinction is if the element is an input or not. If an input you can use:

$('#selector').val().length;

otherwise if the element is a different html element like a paragraph or list item div etc, you must use

$('#selector').text().length;

Anemia

It's right Answer for this Question! Here is really defined, how gets a length of "input field" or "text" value. Additional it's possible to get html length, like $('#selector').html().length. – Pascasia

Answer 6

You don't need to use jquery.

var myString = 'abc';
var n = myString.length;

n will be 3.

Legpull

Answer 7

It's not jquery you need, it's JS:

alert(str.length);

Arenaceous

Answer 8

same way you do it in javascript:

"something".length

Crossfertilization

Answer 9

In some cases String.length might return a value which is different from the actual number of characters visible on the screen (e.g. some emojis are encoded by 2 UTF-16 units):

MDN says: This property returns the number of code units in the string. UTF-16, the string format used by JavaScript, uses a single 16-bit code unit to represent the most common characters, but needs to use two code units for less commonly-used characters, so it's possible for the value returned by length to not match the actual number of characters in the string.

In Unicode separate visible characters are called graphemes. In case you need to account for this case, you'll need some lib that can split the string into graphemes, such as this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/grapheme-splitter

Kennie

Answer 10

In jQuery :

var len = jQuery('.selector').val().length; //or 
( var len = $('.selector').val().length;) //- If Element is Text Box

OR

var len = jQuery('.selector').html().length; //or
( var len = $('.selector').html().length; ) //- If Element is not Input Text Box

In JS :

var len = str.length;

Kao