How to Get the String Length and Size in Python

1. Get the String Length in Python
2. Get the String Size in Python

Strings are a prevalent data type and are used in almost every programming language. It is a collection of characters and can be considered as an array of characters.

In Python, anything enclosed between quotation marks, single or double, can be considered as a string.

This tutorial will introduce how to get the length and size of a string in Python.

Get the String Length in Python

We can create our little function to get the length of a string in Python. The function will iterate through every character in the string using a for loop and increment a counter variable on every iteration until the string’s end is encountered. The following code implements this:

x = "Sample String"
length = 0

for i in x:
    length += 1

print(length)

Output:

13

We can also use the len() function to find the length of a string. For example:

x = "Sample String"
print(len(x))

Output:

13 

Note that the len() function may provide unwanted results at times; for example, it does not count \ character in escape sequences, as shown below.

print(len("\foo"))

Output:

3

Get the String Size in Python

The size of the object is the number of bytes in the memory allocated for this object. The sys module has a function called getsizeof() that returns an object’s memory size in bytes. See the following example code.

import sys

x = "Sample String"

print(sys.getsizeof(x))

Output:

62