How do you find the length of a variable with letters, numbers and symbols in html and php?

Question

If, for example, a person wants their username to be GreenApples-72, how do you count the number of letters, numbers and symbols in the username and add them up?

        if((($_POST['username'])<'2'))    //if the username length is less than 2.
        {
            echo('Your username has fewer than 2 characters');
        }

This is my code so far, this is the checking stage of the code. I'm not sure on how to code this part.

Take a look on `strlen` function on [HERE](http://php.net/manual/en/function.strlen.php) — nanobash, Aug 14 '14 at 08:19
Is it correct that your desired result is the amount of chars and numbers, not the length of the string? — mrcrgl, Aug 14 '14 at 08:24
possible duplicate of [Function to count number of digits in string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11023753/function-to-count-number-of-digits-in-string) — mrcrgl, Aug 14 '14 at 08:28

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 14 '14 at 08:19

0

Use strlen:

echo strlen("GreenApples-72"); // echoes 14

answered Aug 14 '14 at 08:19

Ende Neu

15,581
5
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1

@crypticous Could you explain why? – Ende Neu Aug 14 '14 at 08:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 14 '14 at 08:21

Use strlen() function in php to count the length of the variable. Use the code below to count the length of the variable

if(strlen($_POST['username'])<'2')    //if the username length is less than 2.
        {
            echo('Your username has fewer than 2 characters');
        }

Hope this helps you

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 14 '14 at 10:08

If you allow all characters at this stage (and it seems you do), you should use multibyte function mb_strlen() to check string length:

 mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8'); // set utf-8 encoding for all mb_ functions

 if(mb_strlen($_POST['username'])<'2')    //if the username length is less than 2.
 {
    echo('Your username has fewer than 2 characters');
 }

strlen won't be good enough in this case because:

echo strlen('ą'); // will return 2

echo mb_strlen('ą','UTF-8'); // will return 1

How do you find the length of a variable with letters, numbers and symbols in html and php?

3 Answers3