How to replicate Python 2 style len() in Python 3?

Question

I am looking to replicate Python 2 style len() in Python 3, as it relates to unicode strings.

In Python 2 the len() of a unicode string is its on-disk bytes size. for example: len("애정") returns 6. In Python 3 len() returns the number of characters in the string, the example returns 2.

sys.getsizeof() is not the solution, because that gets the size of the Python object in-memory, not the size the object would be if it was written to the disk.

Answer 1

You can encode it to utf8 like below.

>>> len('애정'.encode('utf8'))
6
>>>