Character limit of a javascript string variable

Question

Can JavaScript string store 100K characters? I've written a script where a string from PHP is passed to a variable in JavaScript. It works fine when it is cut short to almost ten thousand characters but breaks the script when attempting to pass the entire string whose length is a bit greater than 100K. No errors could be found though. Is there any solution for this as to any way of increasing character limit of JavaScript variable? I'm just a beginner. Would appreciate is some one could find a solution for this.

Answer 1

The ECMAScript Standard ECMA-262 (6th Edition, June 2015) says

6.1.4 The String Type

The String type is the set of all ordered sequences of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer values ("elements") up to a maximum length of 2⁵³-1 elements.

So don't plan on using more than 9,007,199,254,740,991 or about 9 quadrillion characters. Of course, you should be prepared for systems which cannot allocate 18 PB chunks of memory, as this is not required for conforming ECMAScript implementations.

Answer 2

I think the question is asking about the practical limit, not the spec limit. And, no, it is not always the amount of RAM you have. I have x86_64 24GB PC running Linux Mint with x86_64 Firefox and x86_64 Chrome, and the limits I ran into were:

• 1,073,741,822 limit in Firefox 84
• 536,870,888 limit in Chrome 87

Any higher and Firefox throws a Uncaught RangeError: repeat count must be less than infinity and not overflow maximum string size, whereas Chrome throws Uncaught RangeError: Invalid string length. Use the following snippet to run a binary search for the max string length in your browser:

for (var startPow2 = 1; startPow2 < 9007199254740992; startPow2 *= 2)     try {" ".repeat(startPow2);} catch(e) {         break;     }  var floor = Math.floor, mask = floor(startPow2 / 2); while (startPow2 = floor(startPow2 / 2))     try {         " ".repeat(mask + startPow2);         mask += startPow2; // the previous statement succeeded     } catch(e) {}  console.log("The max string length for this browser is " + mask);