Finding the size of a variable

[Icepick]

I'm trying to work out how to find the size of a variable, but I'm not having much luck. The only way I can think of doing is it to dump the contents of the variable to a file and use filesize() on the file, but that seems like a horrible way of doing it.

Anyone know of a better way?

[planetsim]

What do you mean. Are you trying to see how big a file is? or are you wanting a variable unrelated to any file to see how big it is in Kb?

If you are wanting to see how big a variable is in Kb usually every letter e.g

"a" is 1 byte without the quotes in Notepad i assume its the same elsewhere. So use strlen if you dealing with text, numbers and than if its over e.g. 1024 its 1Kb in size.

[Icepick]

Im trying to get the size of a var in Kb's, preferably without writing it to a file.
Basically, I'm trying to work out the total size of an email, including attachments, which also has UTF-8 chars in, and I'm trying to find the nicest way of doing it.

[planetsim]

Well firstly you'll need to count the string length hence strlen from that each letter "a" is 1byte not sure if its any different under UTF-8

From that you must use filesize for the file and add them all up. its not the best way. I dont think there is any other way that will differ much from this

[Icepick]

Ok thats great, I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a better way of doing it. Thanks for your help.