What is the length in bytes of a NSString?

Question

How do I get the bytes length of NSString ? if myString contains "hallo", myString.length will return 5, but how many actual bytes are taken?

Answer 1

NSString *test=@"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
NSUInteger bytes = [test lengthOfBytesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSLog(@"%i bytes", bytes);

Answer 2

To get the bytes use

NSData *bytes = [string dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

Then you can check bytes.length

Number of bytes depend on the string encoding

Answer 3

Well:

NSString* string= @"myString";
NSData* data=[string dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSUInteger myLength = data.length;

Answer 4

From the Apple documentation :

An NSString object encodes a Unicode-compliant text string, represented as a sequence of UTF–16 code units. All lengths, character indexes, and ranges are expressed in terms of 16-bit platform-endian values, with index values starting at 0.

So the memory used by an NSString is 2 bytes per character plus whatever fixed memory is used by the object itself.