How to get the size of a string in Python

Question

For example, I get a string:

str = "please answer my question"

I want to write it to a file.

But I need to know the size of the string before writing the string to the file. What function can I use to calculate the size of the string?

Answer 1

If you are talking about the length of the string, you can use len():

>>> s = 'please answer my question'
>>> len(s)  # number of characters in s
25

If you need the size of the string in bytes, you need sys.getsizeof():

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getsizeof(s)
58

Also, don't call your string str. It shadows the built-in str() function.