Faster Way Of Checking String Length With PHP

9th April 2008 - 2 minutes read time

If you want to know the length of a string in PHP you would normally turn to the strlen() function which simply tells you the length of the string.

$string = 'this is a string';
$strLength = strlen($string);

To use this to check the length of the string use the following example.

$string = 'this is a string';
if (strlen($string) < 20) {
 // code here
}

A quicker way of looking at the length of a string would be to use the isset() function in conjunction with the curly braces {} used for locating character from a string.

$string = 'this is a string';
if (!isset($string{20})) {
 // string too short
}

Because isset() is a language construct it works quicker than strlen() so this comparison has almost no overhead at all.

PHP

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