strlen#

Purpose#

Returns the length of a string.

Format#

y = strlen(x)#

Parameters:: x (string or NxK matrix of character data, or NxK string array.) – data
Returns:: y (scalar) – contains the exact length of the string x, or NxK matrix or string array containing the lengths of the elements in x.

Examples#

x1 = "How long?";
x2 = "Classification";
len1 = strlen(x1);
len2 = strlen(x2);

After running the code above:

len1 = 9

len2 = 14

Remarks#

The null character (ASCII 0) is a legal character within strings and so embedded nulls will be counted in the length of strings. The final terminating null byte is not counted, though.

For character matrices, the length is computed by counting the characters (maximum of 8) up to the first null in each element of the matrix. The null character, therefore, is not a valid character in matrices containing character data and is not counted in the lengths of the elements of those matrices.