count characters including spaces

[tsolignani]

Good morning everyone.

Is there a way to count characters including spaces when using length or another function in automagic.

Sharing something to WhatsApp status, you face the 700 chars limits, and I suspect it includes spaces, for for instance it refuses to share a string which is 635 chars, according to automagic.

Sure I could lower the limit to something smaller but I would like to be more accurate.

Thank you, have a nice weekend.

[Horschte]

When you use length() your result is without spaces?
For me it's working fine:

Code: Select all

s = "my string";
r = length(s); //r: 9

[tsolignani]

Thank you.

Then it should be WhatsApp's fault.

It kept telling me it was more than 700 characters, but it wasn't so I supposed WA was counting white spaces as well, while maybe it's its error message which is wrong (you can put less than 700).

Thank you.

[Desmanto]

@tsolignani : This is most likely caused by the length() only count chars, while whatsapp or any other app limit the "chars" using byte storage. Non ASCII char usually use 2-4 bytes in one char. Example Japanese char usually use 3 bytes, emoji use 4 bytes. This is counted as 1 char only when using length().

I am still finding ways to calculate the real byte count. Have tried several java code and can't find a working one.
So far I use workaround code, using encodeURL(), find the non ASCII (and some symbol) using find(). Then use simple math to find the real length.

Code: Select all

status = "Hello ありがとう";
len = length(status); //11 chars, but wrong

//step by step
encode = encodeURL(status); //encode the space and japanese char
lenencode = length(encode); //total length of each encoded byte becomes 3, give 53
percent = length(findAll(encode, '%[0-9A-F]{2}')); //find the number of %xx encoded
reallen = lenencode - 2 * percent; //subtract by twice of that number

Hello = 5 chars, space = 1 char, ありがとう = 5 chars. Total is 11 chars, according to length(). However the byte used is not 11 byte.

encodeURL() and we get Hello%20%E3%81%82%E3%82%8A%E3%81%8C%E3%81%A8%E3%81%86
Which is total 53 chars. Space is now %20, become 3 chars (thrice). Each japanese char now become 9 chars, but it is actually 3 bytes only (since each %xx represent 1 byte). So we know that each encoded char expanded 3 times.
We find all the encoded char and count the occurance, result is 16 byte. 1 from space, 3 byte each from 5 japanese chars.
Since we need count the byte size only, we substract twice the length of the encoded char occurance, give us the real byte size = 21
Hello = 5 byte
space = 1 byte
ありがとう = 15 byte

I don't know how Whatsapp count the max status char limit, but maybe it count every byte used. Try this and see if you can post more than 700 byte. Adding emoji is one way to added up the byte used.


If you are OK with code above , then this is the single line version.

Code: Select all

status = "Hello ありがとう";
//single line version
reallen = length(encodeURL(status)) - 2 * length(findAll(encodeURL(status), '%[0-9A-F]{2}'));