len function does not count special characters

RE: len function does not count special characters

davel001150 — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 17:18:19 GMT

The one super interesting case I ran into, which would be good to watch out for, is the difference between the search() function and find() function. One is case sensitive, the other is not.

But also, one registers capital I with a dot on top as 1 letter; the other registers it as 2 letters. I think it was search() which is case insensitive and correctly reads letters with accents as 1 letter. If you're using the wrong function to locate the end of an XML file with a few of those special characters in there, you could wind up having a bad day like I did.

RE: len function does not count special characters

jesusa310 — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 16:47:37 GMT

Thanks Peter and Mike. Sorry it was my mistake. Len() does consider special characters. The confusion was caused because

0123456789

Is considered as 22 characters by Notepad++ and 21 characters by Appian len().

I believe that Notepad++ uses 2 characters for Return line and Appian one, but there is nothing wrong with that.

RE: len function does not count special characters

Mike Schmitt — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 14:01:14 GMT

Have you tried "lenb()"? I haven't tested it extensively but it claims to return length in bytes for a string, instead of length in characters - which would usually be the same, except (presumably) for cases like unicode characters that consume more than one byte (which i assume is what you mean by "special characters").

RE: len function does not count special characters

Peter Lewis — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 13:06:15 GMT

Can you give an example of the function you tried? In my experience, len() does consider special characters. For example, the result of this expression is 21:

len("0123456789
0123456789")