How do you get the length of a string?

Question

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

Answer 1

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;

Answer 2

The easiest way:

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

Answer 3

same way you do it in javascript:

"something".length

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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:

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Answer 6

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;