XPath function
string-length()
The number of characters in a string. With no argument, of the context node.
string-length() counts characters, not bytes — an accented letter is one, and so is any character in the Basic Multilingual Plane. With no argument it applies to the string-value of the context node.
It is most often used as an emptiness test: [string-length(x) > 0] is 'x has content'.
- Syntax
string-length(string?) → number- Returns
- number
- Kind
- Function
- Version
- XPath 1.0 (libxml2)
Worked examples
Each result below is what the evaluator returned, asserted on every test run. An empty result means an empty node-set — which is an answer, not an error.
The sample documents
Every example on this page runs against this document. The sitemap one is namespaced on purpose — almost every real XML document is, and that changes which expressions match.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<order id="A-1001" tier="gold">
<customer country="NO">Ada Lovelace</customer>
<lines>
<line sku="WIDGET-1" qty="2"><price>14.50</price></line>
<line sku="WIDGET-2" qty="1"><price>39.00</price></line>
<line sku="GIFT-WRAP" qty="1"><price>0.00</price></line>
</lines>
<note> Deliver after 09:00 </note>
</order>Related
- substring()A slice of a string, indexed from 1 — not from 0, which is the mistake that shifts every result by one character.
- normalize-space()Trims leading and trailing whitespace and collapses internal runs to single spaces — the fix for text that looks equal and is not.
- count()How many nodes a node-set contains. The fastest way to check whether an expression matches what you think it does.
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