PowerShell:
Finding the length of a string
How to:
PowerShell makes getting the string length straightforward. Just toss a string at the .Length property, like this:
$myString = "Hello, World!"
$myStringLength = $myString.Length
Write-Host "The string length is: $myStringLength"You’ll get the output:
The string length is: 13That’s all there is to it. Direct and painless.
Deep Dive
Back in the day, getting the length of a string in most programming languages involved complex functions or processes. Today, it’s as simple as a property call in PowerShell.
Beyond the basic .Length property, PowerShell doesn’t offer built-in alternatives for this specific task. However, before PowerShell became a thing, scripting in Windows was done via batch files or VBScript, where finding a string length was not as straightforward.
In terms of implementation, when you use $myString.Length, PowerShell accesses the metadata of the string object – strings in PowerShell are objects from the System.String class, which comes from .NET. The .Length property is a member of that class.
See Also
Dive deeper into PowerShell strings:
For broader context on how strings work in .NET: