Fish Shell:
Finding the length of a string

How to:

Here’s how to get a string’s length in Fish:

set my_string "Hello, World!"
echo (string length "$my_string")

Output:

13

Deep Dive

In Fish, unlike some other shells, string length is a built-in function making it native and efficient. Historically, other shells might have required more verbose syntax or external tools like expr or wc. Fish simplifies tasks with its robust string handling functions, where string length directly gives the count of Unicode characters, which isn’t always equal to the byte count, especially for non-ASCII characters.

Alternatives for string length determination in shells before the string function in Fish could be less reliable because they didn’t always account for multibyte characters. Implementation wise, string length counts Unicode graphemes, which is important for texts containing characters that combine with others to form a single visual unit.

See Also

• Fish documentation on string manipulation: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/string.html
• Unicode Standard for understanding graphemes: https://unicode.org/reports/tr29/