7.6: Counting Characters- strlength vs. length

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Page ID: 136671

Zara Noroozi
Irvine Valley College

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MATLAB has both strlength and length, and they do not always answer the same question. This is an important beginner detail.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

% Run the following commands and notice what MATLAB returns.

strlength('Hello World')

strlength("Hello World")

length('Hello World')

length("Hello World")

The function strlength counts the number of characters in text. The function length behaves more like an array-size function. For a character vector, length returns the number of characters. For a string scalar, length returns the number of string elements, which is 1.

Expression	What it measures	Expected idea
strlength('Hello World')	Characters in the text	11
strlength("Hello World")	Characters in the string	11
length('Hello World')	Number of elements in the character vector	11
length("Hello World")	Number of elements in the string array	1

Note

Use strlength when you want to count characters in text. Use length when you are thinking about array size.

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