Get length of current line

Question

I'm trying to add an indicator in my statusline for the total length of the line (not just the cursor column position, which can be shown with %c). How do I do this?

Answer 1

To get the contents of a line as a string, use getline(<line number>).

To get the contents of the current line as a string, you can use getline(".").

To get the length of a string, you can use strlen(<string>).

Putting it all together, we get strlen(getline(".")). To add it to your statusline, simply:

statusline += "%{strwidth(getline('.'))}"

or for vim-airline (what I use)

" can be any section; this is for section z (right hand side)
let g:airline_section_z = "%{strlen(getline('.'))}"