[bash] Length of string in bash

How do you get the length of a string stored in a variable and assign that to another variable?

myvar="some string"
echo ${#myvar}  
# 11

How do you set another variable to the output 11?

You can use:

MYSTRING="abc123"
MYLENGTH=$(printf "%s" "$MYSTRING" | wc -c)

• wc -c or wc --bytes for byte counts = Unicode characters are counted with 2, 3 or more bytes.
• wc -m or wc --chars for character counts = Unicode characters are counted single until they use more bytes.

To get the length of a string stored in a variable, say:

myvar="some string"
size=${#myvar} 

To confirm it was properly saved, echo it:

$ echo "$size"
11

If you want to use this with command line or function arguments, make sure you use size=${#1} instead of size=${#$1}. The second one may be more instinctual but is incorrect syntax.

I wanted the simplest case, finally this is a result:

echo -n 'Tell me the length of this sentence.' | wc -m;
36

Here is couple of ways to calculate length of variable :

echo ${#VAR}
echo -n $VAR | wc -m
echo -n $VAR | wc -c
printf $VAR | wc -m
expr length $VAR
expr $VAR : '.*'

and to set the result in another variable just assign above command with back quote into another variable as following:

otherVar=`echo -n $VAR | wc -m`   
echo $otherVar

http://techopsbook.blogspot.in/2017/09/how-to-find-length-of-string-variable.html

In response to the post starting:

If you want to use this with command line or function arguments...

with the code:

size=${#1}

There might be the case where you just want to check for a zero length argument and have no need to store a variable. I believe you can use this sort of syntax:

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    #zero length argument 
else
    #non-zero length
fi

See GNU and wooledge for a more complete list of Bash conditional expressions.

Using your example provided

#KISS (Keep it simple stupid)
size=${#myvar}
echo $size