14.1. strlen()

Returns the length of a string.

Prototypes

#include <string.h>
size_t strlen(const char *s);

Description

This function returns the length of the passed null-terminated string (not counting the NUL character at the end). It does this by walking down the string and counting the bytes until the NUL character, so it's a little time consuming. If you have to get the length of the same string repeatedly, save it off in a variable somewhere.

Return Value

Returns the number of characters in the string.

Example

char *s = "Hello, world!"; // 13 characters

// prints "The string is 13 characters long.":

printf("The string is %d characters long.\n", strlen(s));

See Also