Name
Len, LenB Functions
Syntax
Len(string
|varname
)
-
string
Use: Required
Data Subtype: String
A valid string expression.
-
varname
Use: Required
Data Subtype: Any except object
A valid variable name.
Return Value
A Variant with subtype Long.
Description
Counts the number of characters within a string or the size of a
given variable. Use LenB
to determine the actual
number of bytes required to hold a given variable in memory.
Rules at a Glance
string
andvarname
are mutually exclusive; that is, you must specify eitherstring
orvarname
, but not both.If either
string
orvarname
containsNull
,Len
returnsNull
.When you use
LenB
with byte data or a Unicode string,LenB
returns the number of bytes that represent the data or the string.You can’t use
Len
with an object variable.If
varname
is an array, you must also specify a valid subscript. In other words,Len
can’t determine the total number of elements in or the total size of an array.
Programming Tips & Gotchas
Nonstring variants are treated the same as a string variables, and
Len
returns the actual number of characters stored to the variable. But this can lead to unexpected results. Take the following snippet as an example:Dim vVar vVar = 100 MsgBox Len(vVar)
You may expect the
Len
function to return 2 becauseiVar
is obviously a variant of subtype integer. In fact,Len
returns 3: the number of characters contained within the variant. In other words, theLen
andLenB
functions, when used with nonstring variants, return the number of characters ...
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