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 :

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 :

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 :

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 :

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:

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:

13

Using foreach

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

Example:

Number of characters: 25