How to Get the Size of a String in Python?

Problem Formulation: Given a string my_string. Find the number of characters of the string! For example, the string "what is my length?" must yield integer 18 because it has 18 characters.

Here are three examples of our desired outputs:

my_string = "what is my length?"
# Desired output: 18

my_string = "hello"
# Desired output: 5

my_string = ""
# Desired output: 0

Solution: Before we dive into alternatives, here’s the quick answer to this question.

To get the number of characters of a Python string, call Python’s built-in function len(string). For example, len('hello') returns 5 and len('') returns 0. Because the len() function is a Python built-in function, you don’t need to import any library. Pass any iterable into it to find the number of elements. As a string is an iterable of characters, len() returns the number of characters on a string value.

Here are the three examples:

my_string = "what is my length?"
print(len(my_string))
# 18

my_string = "hello"
print(len(my_string))
# 5

my_string = ""
print(len(my_string))
# 0

Here’s an introduction into Python’s built-in len() function:

Just for comprehensibility, I want to address a variant of this question: How to get the size of a string in Python:

How to Get the Number of Bytes Needed to Encode a String in Python?

To get the number of bytes needed to encode a string in Python, import the sys module and call function sys.getsizeof(string) on the string. For example, sys.getsizeof('hello') returns 54 because it requires 54 bytes to encode the five characters.

Here’s a basic example where you count the number of bytes of the string 'hello':

import sys
print(sys.getsizeof('hello'))
# 54

Let’s examine how this number changes when applying it on shorter and shorter strings:

print(sys.getsizeof('ello'))
# 53

print(sys.getsizeof('llo'))
# 52

print(sys.getsizeof('lo'))
# 51

print(sys.getsizeof('o'))
# 50

print(sys.getsizeof(''))
# 49

You can see that even the empty string requires 49 bytes on my computer for housekeeping! Note that this may be different on your computer with another Python version.