OSX terminal string length

Question

Is it possible in OSX's terminal to get the length of a string? Eg:

$ echo "foo".length

Or

$ echo (cat file.txt).length

Answer 1

echo "foo" | wc -c

This counts the number of characters on stdin. Note that this will return 4 since echo adds a newline at the end. Use printf or echo -n to avoid the added newline.

printf "foo" | wc -c

Answer 2

Try with this:

var=hello; echo ${#var}