Difference between revisions of "Template:Str len/doc"

Revision as of 10:43, 28 March 2009

This is a documentation subpage for Template:Str len. It contains usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

This template employs intricate features of template syntax. You are encouraged to familiarise yourself with its setup and parser functions before editing the template. If your edit causes unexpected problems, please undo it quickly, as this template may appear on a large number of pages. You can conduct experiments, and should test all major changes, in either this template's sandbox, the general template sandbox, or your user space before changing anything here.

Template:Caution

This is the {{str len full}} meta-template.

It takes a string as parameter and returns its length. It can count up to 500 in length, and returns 500 for strings that are too long.

Note! For most usage cases it is much easier and costs much less server resources to use {{str ≥ len}} or one of its sister templates. See the see also section below.

Examples

If the parameter is empty or undefined it is considered to be of zero length:

{{str len full}}, {{str len full|}}, {{str len full| }}

Template:Str len full, Template:Str len full, Template:Str len full

This template counts the length of the string, even if it contains spaces or looks like a number:

{{str len full| ab cde }}, {{str len full| 1234567 }}

Template:Str len full, Template:Str len full

It can measure strings up to 500 in length, and returns 500 for strings that are too long:

{{str len full| 499-characters... }}, {{str len full| 1000-characters... }}

Template:Str len full, Template:Str len full

Technical details

MediaWiki has no parser function or magic word to measure string lengths. And measuring string length using template code is very heavy on the servers. Thus this template is as optimised as possible. But you should consider using {{str ≥ len}} instead, since for most usage cases it is much easier to use and it costs much less server resources.

This template calls {{str len full/core}} which does most of the work. For documentation on the internal workings of these two templates see /core. The talk page might also have more details.

See also

Template:String templates see also