[php] Measure string size in Bytes in php

I am doing a real estate feed for a portal and it is telling me the max length of a string should be 20,000 bytes (20kb), but I have never run across this before.

How can I measure byte size of a varchar string. So I can then do a while loop to trim it down.

You can use mb_strlen() to get the byte length using a encoding that only have byte-characters, without worring about multibyte or singlebyte strings. For example, as drake127 saids in a comment of mb_strlen, you can use '8bit' encoding:

<?php
    $string = 'Cién cañones por banda';
    echo mb_strlen($string, '8bit');
?>

You can have problems using strlen function since php have an option to overload strlen to actually call mb_strlen. See more info about it in http://php.net/manual/en/mbstring.overload.php

For trim the string by byte length without split in middle of a multibyte character you can use:

mb_strcut(string $str, int $start [, int $length [, string $encoding ]] )

Do you mean byte size or string length?

Byte size is measured with strlen(), whereas string length is queried using mb_strlen(). You can use substr() to trim a string to X bytes (note that this will break the string if it has a multi-byte encoding - as pointed out by Darhazer in the comments) and mb_substr() to trim it to X characters in the encoding of the string.

PHP's strlen() function returns the number of ASCII characters.

strlen('borsc') -> 5 (bytes)

strlen('boršc') -> 7 (bytes)

$limit_in_kBytes = 20000;

$pointer = 0;
while(strlen($your_string) > (($pointer + 1) * $limit_in_kBytes)){
    $str_to_handle = substr($your_string, ($pointer * $limit_in_kBytes ), $limit_in_kBytes);
    // here you can handle (0 - n) parts of string
    $pointer++;
}

$str_to_handle = substr($your_string, ($pointer * $limit_in_kBytes), $limit_in_kBytes);
// here you can handle last part of string

.. or you can use a function like this:

function parseStrToArr($string, $limit_in_kBytes){
    $ret = array();

    $pointer = 0;
    while(strlen($string) > (($pointer + 1) * $limit_in_kBytes)){
        $ret[] = substr($string, ($pointer * $limit_in_kBytes ), $limit_in_kBytes);
        $pointer++;
    }

    $ret[] = substr($string, ($pointer * $limit_in_kBytes), $limit_in_kBytes);

    return $ret;
}

$arr = parseStrToArr($your_string, $limit_in_kBytes = 20000);

Further to PhoneixS answer to get the correct length of string in bytes - Since mb_strlen() is slower than strlen(), for the best performance one can check "mbstring.func_overload" ini setting so that mb_strlen() is used only when it is really required:

$content_length = ini_get('mbstring.func_overload') ? mb_strlen($content , '8bit') : strlen($content);