How do you get the length of a string?

Question

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

Excellent just use normal JS. – RubbleFord Jun 25 '09 at 14:03 — RubbleFord, Jun 25 '09 at 14:03

Artem Barger · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-22T12:35:00.057

499

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:

[...""].length

or create an auxiliary function

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

edited May 22 '19 at 12:35

answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:00

Artem Barger

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I was too, oh the joys of SO. – karim79 Jun 25 '09 at 14:12
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I bet that's just competition. :D – Arnis Lapsa Aug 24 '10 at 07:34
11

Artem Barger -- probably because he asked about using Jquery. – cyclical Jun 16 '15 at 18:08
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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. – Adrian Pauly Jan 11 '16 at 20:14
1

`"".length == 2`. How can we get the actual number of characters? – Pierre Thibault May 22 '19 at 12:28
to make unicode aware lenght you need to run it following way: [...""].length – Artem Barger May 22 '19 at 12:32
"You don't need jquery..." - that's not what the OP asked. – Millhorn Mar 03 '21 at 16:25

score 212 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 18 '16 at 16:31

212

The easiest way:

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

edited Jan 18 '16 at 16:31

StudioTime

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answered Feb 14 '10 at 20:50

Andrei Iarus

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the only answer that answers the question as asked. – mtntrailrunner Apr 26 '13 at 13:45
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how is that? no where in the question does he say anything about the string coming from an `:input` value – mkoryak Sep 05 '14 at 01:38
2

so does this one: `len = $('#selector').is('div') ? "someString".length : 0` and makes just as much sense... – mkoryak Dec 29 '14 at 23:28
but this still just uses javascript doesn't it? same as @Artem Barger's answer – Malcolm Salvador Jul 31 '17 at 01:37

score 44 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:02

44

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;

answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:02

andreialecu

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+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. – Grant Wagner Jun 25 '09 at 14:43

score 22 · Answer 4 · answered May 16 '12 at 18:22

22

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;

answered May 16 '12 at 18:22

A_funs

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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`. – Eugen Jan 08 '17 at 16:01

score 22 · Answer 5 · edited Sep 30 '12 at 07:51

22

HTML

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

SCRIPT

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

RESULT

10

edited Sep 30 '12 at 07:51

Alan Whitelaw

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answered Nov 19 '10 at 02:10

Joedel

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score 21 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:01

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You don't need to use jquery.

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

n will be 3.

answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:01

Lawrence Barsanti

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score 14 · Answer 7 · answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:00

14

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

alert(str.length);

answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:00

karim79

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mkoryak · Answer 8 · 2014-09-05T01:38:56.217

13

same way you do it in javascript:

"something".length

edited Sep 05 '14 at 01:38

answered Jun 25 '09 at 14:00

mkoryak

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Maxim Saplin · Answer 9 · 2021-03-09T07:43:26.730

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

score 2 · Answer 10 · edited Mar 17 '22 at 18:24

2

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;

edited Mar 17 '22 at 18:24

David Faber

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answered Apr 17 '15 at 17:50

Mahak Choudhary

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How do you get the length of a string?

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