How to find number of characters in a string in PHP ?

We have given a string and the task is to count number of characters in a string str in PHP. In order to do this task, we have the following methods in PHP:

Method 1: Using strlen() Method

The strlen() method is used to get the length of a given string str. Length of the string including all the white spaces and special characters in this method.

Syntax:

strlen( $string )

Example :

<?php
// PHP program to count all
// characters in a string 
  
$str = "  Geeks for Geeks  "; 
  
// Using strlen() function to
// get the length of string
$len = strlen($str);

// Printing the result
echo $len; 
?>

19

Method 2: Using mb_strlen() Method

The mb_strlen() method is used to return the number of characters in a string having character encoding. A multi-byte character is counted as 1.

Syntax:

mb_strlen($str, $encoding);

Note: Before using this function, install the php7.0-mbstring package using the following command:

sudo apt install php7.0-mbstring

Example :

<?php
// PHP program to count all
// characters in a string 
  
$str = "  Geeks for Geeks  "; 
  
// Using mb_strlen() function 
// to get the length of string
$len = mb_strlen($str);

// Printing the result
echo $len; 
?>

Output

19

Method 3: Using iconv_strlen() Method

The iconv_strlen() method is used to get the character count of a string, as an integer.

Syntax:

int iconv_strlen( string $str, 
    string $charset = ini_get("iconv.internal_encoding"))

Example :

<?php
// PHP program to count number
// of characters in a string 
  
$str = "  Geeks for Geeks  "; 
  
// Using iconv_strlen() function 
// to get the length of string
$len = iconv_strlen($str);

// Printing the result
echo $len; 
?>

19

Method 4: Using grapheme_strlen() Method

The grapheme_strlen() method is used to get the string length in grapheme units (not bytes or characters).

Syntax:

int grapheme_strlen(string $input)

Example :

<?php
// PHP program to count number
// of characters in a string 
  
$str = "  Geeks for Geeks  "; 
  
// Using grapheme_strlen() function 
// to get the length of string
$len = grapheme_strlen($str);

// printing the result
echo $len; 
?>

19

Method 5: Using preg_match_all()

You can count the number of characters in a string using preg_match_all() in PHP. By using a regular expression that matches each character individually, you can count the occurrences of all characters in the string.

Example:

<?php
$string = "Hello World!";

// Use preg_match_all() to count all characters
preg_match_all('/./u', $string, $matches);

$numChars = count($matches[0]);

echo $numChars; // Output: 12 (including space and punctuation)

?>

12

Using for Loop

Using a for loop in PHP, you can count the number of characters in a string by iterating through each character until the end of the string.

Example:

<?php
$string = "Hello, World!";
$length = 0;
for ($i = 0; isset($string[$i]); $i++) {
    $length++;
}
echo $length . PHP_EOL; 
?>

13

Using foreach

In this approach we iterate through each character of the string using a foreach loop and count them.

Example:

<?php
$string = "Welcome to GeeksForGeeks!";
$length = 0;

foreach (str_split($string) as $char) {
    $length++;
}

echo "Number of characters: $length";
?>

Number of characters: 25

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