The GNU C Library - String Length

String Length

You can get the length of a string using the strlen function. This function is declared in the header file `string.h'.

Function size_t strlen (const char *s)

The strlen function returns the length of the null-terminated string s. (In other words, it returns the offset of the terminating null character within the array.)

For example,

	strlen ("hello, world")
	    => 12

When applied to a character array, the strlen function returns the length of the string stored there, not its allocation size. You can get the allocation size of the character array that holds a string using the sizeof operator:

	char string[32] = "hello, world"; 
	sizeof (string)
	    => 32
	strlen (string)
	    => 12