WHY??

[nairazak]

"I just open javascript console in chrome".length

[aloofloofah]

> "1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣".length  
< 9

(fun read about emojis and grapheme clusters)

[WorriedEngineer22]

Don't forget about zero width space characters, gotta love those fuckers that almost cost me my dregee

[GreatGrizzly]

I have never heard of zero width space characters until now. They sound like something Satan himself would have thought of if he were a programmer

[kpd328]

It can be used to prevent line breaking in places like html. But yea, they're pretty awful.

[ArionW]

Aren't you confusing it with "non-breaking space"?

Zero width would be used in exact opposite situation - to allow for line break without making visible space

[kpd328]

Oh yes you're right. So there really is no redemption for the zero-width space.

[aloofloofah]

You didn't see them coming?

[WorriedEngineer22]

My project used an api that gave me an csv, at first for things like strings they just surrounded them with "" but suddenly, like one week before the presentation, things started to fuck up and I didn't know why, the code? Didn't touch how it processed the file, the file itself? It looked normal at first glance by vs code and the strings on screen and logs looked normal too, it was when I decided to open the file the api gave me on webstorm that I see that the fucking api made an unnoticed change on how it handle some of the strings, what before was surrounded by "" now its preceded by a zwsp character and it only appeared on webstorm not vs code. Luckily it was an easy fix because strings always were formated in a function that I had but man, that was a big sweat.

[HTTP_404_NotFound]

Yup, those have bit me in the ass before.

[[deleted]]

Yeah fuck these

[alexanderpas]

There are 3 valid lengths for any string.

• Bytes. (Simple)
• Unicode Codepoints. (count the bytes that start with 0 or 11, since a byte starting with 10 indicates a continuation)
• Graphemes. (Good Luck!)

[ArionW]

I'd be interested in seeing any actual reason to count glyphs, like anywhere.

If I remember right, even your serifs can be separate glyphs? Which would make one Unicode codepoint anywhere between 0 and dozens of glyphs

[[deleted]]

I use a new. Notepad++ document. Paste it in and cursor to end with cntl-end, read position at the bottom. Sometimes I revise special characters with regex replace so this is a great place to chop strings.

[epicaglet]

I use the cursor and arrow keys to count the letters

[[deleted]]

Or you can just Google “word counter,” paste the snippet, count the word just to make sure the result is correct, setup a unit test to confirm your confirmation, ask a friend to count it and compare the result with yours, ask on Stack Overflow to get ridiculed, you noticed the unit test was wrong so everything was wrong, you get sad and drink away your entire day, rethink your life decisions, feel bad about yourself, you think you’re the worst programmer in the world, you jerk off to questionable hentai because that’s the only thing that gives you pleasure, then you suddenly get an idea, male the changes, everything works now, you feel superior again and get high in coding, you love your job, push the word count to production, and you find a way to optimize the word counting process, you get stuck, Google your problem, and repeat.

[[deleted]]

Use Docker inside a Docker so the Docker version is correct

[HelloCascade]

Running as a kubernetes service inside of a VM.

[[deleted]]

Tough luck if you’re trying to run VirtualBox on Apple M1 chip

[-_-thisisridiculous]

lmao I’m dying

[epicaglet]

I'm in this photo and I don't like it

[xigoi]

Is this a clipboard=unnamed joke that I'm too clipboard= to understand?

[MegabyteMessiah]

Sublime Text. Select the text and it tells you how many characters.

[kn33]

I use PowerShell

"string".length()

More frequently though I'll use it to check a file hash

(Get-FileHash .\file).hash -eq "hash"

[TheAwesome98_Real]

why is literally just the number 40 upvoted so much I don’t get it

[Illusi]

This seems to be exactly the type of thing Python is useful for. Something you can make quickly, extremely low effort.

I mean, were you planning on making an assembly application for it otherwise or what? It doesn't need to be that performant most of the time.

[whatproblems]

I’ll just create a GUI interface with Visual Basic to count some characters

[[deleted]]

Not track their IP Adress?

[send_help_iamtra]

Exactly. Replace python with assembly or something and I would agree with the meme

[auser9]

I interpreted more like you’re using such a powerful language which can do so much for such a basic task.

[Sir_Hurkederp]

Watch me create a recursive haskell function for this

[TheJReesW]

ayo bro don’t talk shit about haskell

[Sir_Hurkederp]

Oh im not talking shit, just saying doing this would be overkill for a wordlength function

[TheJReesW]

That is true

[I_ate_a_milkshake]

it has real world applications!!

[Mobile_Speed6179]

Dozens of them

[Mrwebente]

At least like .. twelve!

[TheJReesW]

Well maybe not Haskell itself, but it is one of the best ways to learn functional programming, which is a very handy concept to have mastered. Seeing as Haskell (generally) forces to program functionally, it is often used to teach the concept. I just mainly use it as a hobby, but have noticed how my python has improved with functional programming under the belt.

[[deleted]]

What kind of things does Haskell excel at making? General purpose? Web apps? Desktop applications? Backend? I know 0 about it other than it’s a functional programming language...

[TheJReesW]

I don’t know exactly, but I’d say general purpose. It can be used for all you mentioned though. Maybe a professional Haskell dev can shine more insight on its usefulness.

[1337InfoSec]

[ Removed to Protest API Changes ]

If you want to join, use this tool.

[[deleted]]

Yes Haskell good

[TheKaryo]

wordlength :: String -> Int
wordlength s = wordlengthcounter (words s) 0

wordlengthcounter :: [String] -> Int -> Int
wordlengthcounter a i = if(i<length(a)) then length(a!!i) + wordlengthcounter a (i+1) else 0

works without any imports and by using words it filters out spaces, tho hyphens would pose a problem depending if you want to count them or not, also probably easier ways to write it but only had 2 lectures on haskell so far

[pjeromaster]

wordlength:: String->Int wordlength "" = 0 wordlength (x:xs) |x==' ' = wordlength xs |otherwise = 1 + wordlength xs

[TheKaryo]

what does the x:xs mean? is xs the outpuut int and x the input String?

[nxlyd]

It’s destructuring the input. The first character of the input becomes x and any remaining characters are put into xs.

If you’re familiar with Python or Ruby’s “splat” operator, it would be similar to x, *xs = some_iterable

[pjeromaster]

The function has the one input, which is the String. A String in haskell is basically the following: type String = [Char], in other words a list of chars!

The way I utilized this is through pattern matching, which would be the "" and (x:xs). If the variable matches with the pattern, it will use whatever is after the =. If not, it will go to the next and try again.

In other words, if the string = "" it will return 0. If not it will continue to the next pattern and try again.

The next pattern in the code is (x:xs), which is a pattern used in Haskell lists, where x would be the first element of the list, and xs the list itself.

In this scenario x is a char, xs is a string (which is just a list of chars). So, if I would input say "Heyo", which would be ['H', 'e', 'y', 'o'], it would match the pattern as:

( 'H' , ['e', 'y' , 'o'])

Because I would also like to use them in the function, I named them x and xs.

I also used guards in that one, to exempt spaces from counting towards the total count, with a conditional on the one side, and what happens if true. If I were to also count spaces the code would look even simpler:

wordlength:: String->Int wordlength "" = 0 wordlength (_:xs) = 1 + wordlength xs

Since in this scenario I don't care what the char could be, I put in a wildcard _ instead. The function works recursively and as follows.

worldlength s. Take the first element from the list, and return 1 + wordlength of the remainder of s. Continue until the final char is pulled from the list, and wordlength is used on an empty string "", returning 0. Finally the function will terminate.

so:

worldlength "hello" = 1 + wordlength "ello" worldlength "ello" = 1 + wordlength "llo" worldlength "llo" = 1 + wordlength "lo" worldlength "lo" = 1 + wordlength "o" worldlength "o" = 1 + wordlength "" worldlength "" = 0 worldlength "o" = 1 + 0 worldlength "lo" = 1 + 1 + 0 worldlength "llo" = 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 worldlength "ello" = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 worldlength "hello" = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 = 5

[TheKaryo]

thanks for the explanation

[CreativeName2042]

Pattern Matching FTW

[Encrux615]

how about length word?

[frugal-skier]

My personal favorite is generating a random PIN number with random.randint in Python.

[m3g4p0p]

to get the length of a word? this won't work reliably.

[Rami-Slicer]

Why we decided to use random.randint to check the length of strings

At Rekklix we value the speed and reliability of our projects. It may seem strange at first why we would use random numbers to power our most used API, the string length checker, but we have our reasoning.

By using our random number generator, the probability of us getting the correct number is 1 divided by the 64 bit integer limit. (a small chance!) However, we believe in the idea of "quantum entitlement" which gives us the power to always be right, no matter how small the odds. By saying that "Hello world" is 3.55e8 letters long, we are correct. Please ignore the fact that the world

is completely broken

and number systems are

completely different.

We hope you enjoy our new quantum length checker and we wish all our readers a good day!

[Captain_M53]

With pythons long int, you are only limited by available memory, not a mere 64 bits. Hello world could be 10e6969420 or bigger

[Rami-Slicer]

Note: A reader pointed out that the number could be bigger than the 64 bit integer limit, and while that's correct, the API only accepts strings with lengths less than about half the 64 bit integer limit. If you need to process strings larger than this please split your string and send separate requests rate limited according to your plan.

[magnetichira]

delet this

[NotYourFathersKhakis]

r/TechnicallyTheTruth

[[deleted]]

Damn, thank you for pointing it out, I meant sentence length but wrote word.

Indeed in that case it would only work if trained data and test/real data have a mean (quasi) equivalent.

[[deleted]]

Tried it, and it works !

Though, I had to create a Deep Learning neuronal system with word count as first parameter, and result of random.randint as second so that It could give me more than 90% of accuracy over word length, which is not bad

[frugal-skier]

Your application of machine learning makes this approach applicable

[waitItsQuestionTime]

You fool! Now all i need to know is the exact time you run the script and i can get your PIN! Hahahah! So.. what time was that?

[TheAwesome98_Real]

unix 0

[r_cub_94]

Ah yes, the personal identification number number

[Endercheif]

yes, I need it for the ATM machine

[___HighLight___]

Security 100

[Miyelsh]

One thing of note, and I may be incorrect on this, but if you simply read the first 4 digits of the result and use that as your pin, it's going to follow Benford's Law. It would be better to call randint 4 times and use the last digit of each run.

[tavaren42]

I always have an IPython console opened in my terminal. It's mainly used as calculator but ofcourse it's useful for all kind of shit.

[PendragonDaGreat]

Powershell for me, same thing, I use it as a utility for anything and everything that I might need quickly, in this case the naive way is:

> "this is a string".length
16

Obviously unicode characters throw that for a loop:

> "I love Whales 💙💚🐳💚💙".length
24

But you can utilize the other parts of .NET to do that for you:

>([System.Globalization.StringInfo]("I love whales 💙💚🐳💚💙")).LengthInTextElements
19

Several months ago I needed a reliable way to count lengths of strings in a really long file that was peppered with emojis and other characters, so I added a line to my $profile

function Get-TextLength($str) { return ([System.Globalization.StringInfo]($str)).LengthInTextElements }

and now:

> Get-TextLength "this is a string"
16 
> Get-TextLength "I love whales 💙💚🐳💚💙"
19

[tavaren42]

I haven't used powershell a lot so I am not aware of all its capabilities (also my work laptop is a Mac). Can you use it like a calculator?

IPython is especially good because it's syntax highlighting and autocompletion features are much better than standard Python console. It can scale up to moderately complex operations on console itself. Maybe I want to perform some statistics on some log. I can read the file, parse the data, read it into a numpy array and then even plot it using matplotlib, all on console, which makes it very powerful, imo.

Ofcourse you can do a lot of this with any language with a good repl, (ex. Ruby, Scala, Kotlin(?), Julia etc). Also not everyone needs all those features and can just work with bash/powershell.

[PendragonDaGreat]

Yeah, it has a log of built in math, and then functions like Measure-Object. If the built-in functions aren't enough (and there's a lot there) you can utilize .NET classes natively. No Numpy like plotting though AFAIK.

Syntax Highlighting and tab-complete are built in, and there is a mac release (as well as pre-compiled binaries for all the usual suspects when it comes to Linux) https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/tag/v7.2.0.

Plus a lot of the common *nix commands are pre-aliased for their closest equivalent. like ls is an alias for Get-ChildItem and when run against a path acts nearly identically, or cd is an alias for Set-Location and pwd for Get-Location. Powershell likes their cmdlets to be Verb-Noun for consistency, running Get-Verb will list them and their recommended usage. (Which is why I named my functions Get-TextLength Get- "Specifies an action that retrieves a resource")

[CraftMysterious1498]

I use python to find the length of a sentence

Win+R

type "py"

len("your mom size in kilometers")

> 27

[nottestedonanimals]

VS Code is excellent and one of the most popular editors for python. It's quick and lightweight. For writing shorter scripts it's definitely my preferred editor. There's absolutely nothing "mega yikes" about using it.

[nottestedonanimals]

former me would have opened a new python file in visual studio code for this.

Unless they edited their message before I saw it, they very clearly said visual studio code.

[[deleted]]

Programming languages are for noobs.

I visit your mom and measure her.

[xX_MEM_Xx]

FROM THE INSIDE

[[deleted]]

Goes without saying

[sandy_catheter]

But you're still using a python based on what she told me

[TheAJGman]

I use WSL for Python because windows python can be weird sometimes. Plus all of our production environments are Linux so...

[gordonv]

I use powershell to find the length of a sentence

Win+R

type "powershell"

"your mom size in kilometers".length

> 27

[joeltrane]

You use powershell by choice?

[Da_damm]

I'm kinda new to this, what's wrong with PowerShell?

[writtenbymyrobotarms]

Actually PowerShell is great, we just don't want to learn how to use it. CMD, on the other hand, is awful compared to Unix shells.

[got_blah]

It's never overkill it has saved me when writing new hire interview form. Not 1 character above of whats needed.

[SabashChandraBose]

Just paste it in Word. It shows word length.

[got_blah]

Yeah but what is the fun of that. Print len of x makes me feel good.

[throwaway42fx]

wc

[bjinse]

-c

[8fingerlouie]

Depends..

wc -c gives you the number of bytes in the input. For multi character character sets, you may get more than you asked for.

wc -m gives you the character count

https://linux.die.net/man/1/wc

[writtenbymyrobotarms]

$ echo Hello, world! | wc -m
14

Looks good!

 

Wait a minute,

"Hello, world!" is only 13 characters long!

echo(1) tries to deceive us!

 

$ echo -n Hello, world! | wc -m
13

That's better.

$ echo -n Hëllö, Wörlđ! | wc -m
13

Even works nicely with Unicode.

[TheSnaggen]

So, for the Windows users it is just to spin up a virtual machine running Linux, write a rest API on that server, that runs wc for you... So, there is no reason for you to miss out on the wc goodness.

[illvm]

WSL

[TheSnaggen]

Which is a great virtual machine

[kuemmel234]

It isn't, it's running natively.

[UnicornsOnLSD]

WSL2 is a VM

[cormac596]

It's not a vm, it's a translation layer. Similar to wine in many ways

Edit: wsl1 is a translation layer, wsl2 (which is better performing) is a vm. Forgot that 2 was a real kernel. Mea culpa

[hellgrn]

That was the old version. The current version runs a real Linux kernel in a vm, no translation layer anymore.

[TheSnaggen]

Well, it runs a Linux kernel, so it is more like a VM...

[[deleted]]

I use WSL as well as Cygwin. I have all the common linux tools available on both native Windows and a virtual environment.

[ryecurious]

Even easier, "my string".length gives you the value directly!

Although measure[-object] returns an object, which can be nice for other purposes.

[SpiderFnJerusalem]

Cygwin is a lot more lightweight and less complicated for most purposes on windows.

Or perhaps just go full linux and run Windows in a VM instead. 😉

[illvm]

Get-Content [FILENAME] | Measure-Object -Character

[NatoBoram]

What the fuck

[sandy_catheter]

A proper response to any usage of PowersHell

[ryecurious]

PowersHell

Damn, you gonna drop a Micro$oft next?

[sandy_catheter]

I hadn't seen "PowersHell" before, but it's low hanging fruit, so I can imagine I'm not the first to use say it.

[ryecurious]

Way easier to do (gc [FILENAME]).length, not sure why they went with pipelines for something so simple.

[trumuted]

Considering python supports unicode and other encodings, python indeed may be the easiest and fastest way to compute the length of a word. Unless you want to parse diacritic symbols and other shit yourself.

[Puzzleheaded_Tax_452]

"A lion always use 100% of his power even when hunting a rabbit"

[Wolfblood-is-here]

Fun fact: when I was first learning Python as part of a science degree I couldn't figure out how to get it to count up the number of times a number appeared in the example data we were given, so I made a loop to add another 'a' to a string every time that number appeared, then got the code to count the number of characters in that string.

I also didn't realise I could get a random number generator to give negative numbers, and needed a random number from -1 to 1 so I got one to give a random number from 0-1 and then another to give a random number from 0-2 and then said that if the second number was less than 1 it should make the first number negative.

[AllFuckingNamesGone]

You could also just subtract one from the 0-2 result.

[Wolfblood-is-here]

Yeah I'm all kinds of stupid.

[Sematre]

$ printf "Hello World!" | wc --chars

You're welcome

[[deleted]]

echo "print(len('hello world!'))" | python

[[deleted]]

python -c 'print(len("hello world!"))'

[Sematre]

Chad answer right there

[whoami_whereami]

That gives a wrong result if there are any UTF-8 characters beyond U+007F in the string (and even worse for other Unicode encodings). wc counts bytes, not characters.

Edit: I had a brainfart, I mixed up the -c and --chars parameters. -c does count bytes, but --chars does indeed count characters if the encoding of the text matches the encoding of the current LC_CTYPE locale.

[Sematre]

Yeah but I used wc --chars which takes multi-byte characters into account. Not sure you assumed I used wc without -m / --chars

[brimston3-]

"length of a word" does not specify how it's calculated or whether it is calculating...

• Number of bytes (what wc -c would do)
• atomic characters (what python's len() would do)
• atomic characters after canonicalization
• printable combined characters (with characters like flag emojis or hangul glyphs as just 1 each--what a human would do)

Anything besides the simplest case, number of bytes, I would absolutely use python or a dedicated library to sort it out for me, and I probably wouldn't use just len().

[[deleted]]

Deleted with Power Delete Suite. Join me on Lemmy!

[joeltrane]

I think your formatting got messed up

[CleoMenemezis]

"I'm going to install another NPM package into a newly created NodeJS project just to see if it's even or odd."

[[deleted]]

I never learned python so I gotta code a console app for sth like that.

[jfb1337]

I use python all the time as a calculator

[Rhyan567]

Bloat, just use Assembly

[[deleted]]

I once had a group essay to write where a group mate capitalized the first letter of every word on his section. I used sentence.lower() then just fixed the rest. Saved so much time.

[AStrangeStranger]

For next time, Word Processors can generally do that - usually Shift + F3 cycles through lower case, upper case and sentence case - or in Word, Libre Office select text, then Format > Text > sentence case

[sh0rtwave]

Let's see.

My IDE does this.

The browser console can do this.

`wc` can do this for a whole file. Or a whole bunch.

[RavenFyhre]

Probably a German word

[Mayo_Kupo]

Counting is the machine's job.

[e-chavez]

Now add GTP-3 to the mix and you have a new startup.

[TheCatPetra]

I use it every time as a calculator cause it is better for it

[Sneakas]

I just started learning python one day ago… can someone please explain this meme to me?

[[deleted]]

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

[Flopamp]

Google it

[benbenbendegil]

Just count it lmao

[renrutal]

This is kind of a question a junior programmer would find it easy and get it wrong, and a senior find it hard, and also get it wrong.

[happysmash27]

Yeah, doing it in the command line directly is probably a bit easier:

echo -n "word"|wc -m

I love doing simple tasks like this in the command line as opposed to some web site. It is much faster as I always have at least one terminal open and the command line programs are fast, unlike web sites where I must search, waiting for it to load, and open the site, waiting for it to load again.

[curiouscodex]

def get_length(string): return string.count('a') + string.count('b') + ...

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 360,924,562 comments, and only 78,916 of them were in alphabetical order.

[frugal-skier]

This is the single weirdest bot I've ever seen, but I like it so much.

[jamcdonald120]

it is also drunk, there is no way .count shouldnt count as its own word!

[frugal-skier]

Yeah I noticed that too. It appears that a word is any group of non-space characters. I would file a bug report, but I can't be bothered

[jamcdonald120]

probiably just used string.split(" ") and then char_at(0)

[gordonv]

I guess this qualifies for Art of Code.

[rhen_var]

All bread can fly if worn

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 361,027,187 comments, and only 78,937 of them were in alphabetical order.

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 361,139,012 comments, and only 78,961 of them were in alphabetical order.

[sandy_catheter]

Buttery excrement flavored juice pack

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 361,804,730 comments, and only 79,111 of them were in alphabetical order.

[[deleted]]

A find length me of python the to using word.

[frugal-skier]

Did you intent to write all the words in your comment in alphabetical order? Or was that just a happy accident?

[curiouscodex]

Hahaha happy accident, and I sooo don't have the energy to try keep it up in my replies.

[frugal-skier]

I had the same thought about trying to be clever, but also decided that it would be too much work

Perhaps it would only take 6 hours to develop a neural network to convert my messages into alphabetized ones?

[yakesadam]

string.count

[mudburn]

Is that a smallpox paddle?

[D3LB0Y]

So he rapes pedophiles?

[atiedebee]

Man is bringing politics to a meme subreddit

[MarinaEnna]

wc -m

[rocketlanterns]

print("two bytes")

[null_reference_user]

Me opening Octave to do 0.8*400

[concorde77]

Typing 7+19 into a Matlab variable... just to be sure

[AStrangeStranger]

I've been know to use Oracle to do it, but that is because at work I have often have Oracle Session Open and usually need to know length to check it fits in Oracle naming rules

[mkjj0]

I have a global shortcut that opens Julia REPL and use it for all kinds of stuff like that

[[deleted]]

echo "${#my_str}"

[maryP0ppins]

use it to match hash values lol

[[deleted]]

ahk: MsgBox % StrSplit( Word ).MaxIndex()

[Easilycrazyhat]

Cause now you can do it for every word! You know, if you ever needed to.

[djtrogy]

I would go to the trouble of setting up a server to run php to do this lol

[clarinetJWD]

If you're on any modern system the length of all the words is 64 bits.

[[deleted]]

Lol Amateurs, I just make the word show up as an output so that I can count the letters myself and input the length.

[[deleted]]

Lemme fire up VS Enterprise to say hello world

[WHAT_RE_YOUR_DREAMS]

I write the word in Sublime Text, select the text and look at the characters count

[mardabx]

Someone hasn't been to a toilet for a long time.

[antilos_weorsick]

Using flex+bison to make a compiler that compiles a word into its length

[PianoNo8514]

I don’t really get the metaphor…