Function to return size of string

[OhLordy]

Does anyone know of a php function that returns the size (in bytes) of a string?
I've had a look through the string section on php.net but all I could find was count_chars which isn't quite what I wanted.
If anyone knows how I can manipulate this function to my ends that would be great.
Thanks
Rob

[toma42]

Um,
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strlen.php

That function is named nearly the same in just about every programming language.

[douceur]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't strlen() tell you the length of the string, and not how large it is in bytes?

[OhLordy]

That is what I thought. I'm not sure if my script for calculating the size is correct

<?
$tot_size=0;
$check_size=count_chars($string);
for($i=0;$i<count($check_size);$i++) {
  $tot_size+=($i*check_size[$i]);
}

echo("Total size in bytes of the string ".$tot_size);
?>

Any feedback?
Thanks
Rob

[douceur]

If that works as you want it to (I honestly don't know), I believe this would be more efficient:

$tot_size = 0;
$check_size = count_chars($string, 1);
foreach ($check_size as $value => $frequency) {
  $tot_size += ($value * $frequency);
}

echo "Total size in bytes of the string is $tot_size";

I say that for two reasons. First, adding the mode '1' to count_chars makes it only return those values whose frequency is greater than 0, as processing those is a waste of time. Two, a foreach loop will not waste time with the values that do not exist.