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The size() function is consistent with other STL containers (like vector, map, etc.) and length() is consistent with most peoples intuitive notion of character strings like a word, sentence or paragraph. We say a paragraph'ss length not its size, so length() is to make things more readable.
While std::string has the size of 24 bytes, it allows strings up to 22 bytes(!!) with no allocation. To achieve this libc++ uses a neat trick: the size of the string is not saved as-is but rather in a special way: if the string is short (< 23 bytes) then it stores size() * 2 .
The C++ String class has length() and size() function. These can be used to get the length of a string type object. To get the length of the traditional C like strings, we can use the strlen() function. That is present under the cstring header file.
This function is used to find the length of the string in terms of bytes. This is the actual number of bytes that conform the contents of the string , which is not necessarily equal to the storage capacity.
As per the documentation, these are just synonyms. size() is there to be consistent with other STL containers (like vector, map, etc.) and length() is to be consistent with most peoples' intuitive notion of character strings. People usually talk about a word, sentence or paragraph's length, not its size, so length() is there to make things more readable.
Ruby's just the same, btw, offering both #length and #size as synonyms for the number of items in arrays and hashes (C++ only does it for strings).
Minimalists and people who believe "there ought to be one, and ideally only one, obvious way to do it" (as the Zen of Python recites) will, I guess, mostly agree with your doubts, @Naveen, while fans of Perl's "There's more than one way to do it" (or SQL's syntax with a bazillion optional "noise words" giving umpteen identically equivalent syntactic forms to express one concept) will no doubt be complaining that Ruby, and especially C++, just don't go far enough in offering such synonymical redundancy;-).
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