String: length

A non-negative integer.

This property returns the number of code units in the string. JavaScript uses UTF-16 encoding, where each Unicode character may be encoded as one or two code units, so it's possible for the value returned by length to not match the actual number of Unicode characters in the string. For common scripts like Latin, Cyrillic, wellknown CJK characters, etc., this should not be an issue, but if you are working with certain scripts, such as emojis, mathematical symbols, or obscure Chinese characters, you may need to account for the difference between code units and characters.

The language specification requires strings to have a maximum length of 2⁵³ - 1 elements, which is the upper limit for precise integers. However, a string with this length needs 16384TiB of storage, which cannot fit in any reasonable device's memory, so implementations tend to lower the threshold, which allows the string's length to be conveniently stored in a 32-bit integer.

• In V8 (used by Chrome and Node), the maximum length is 2²⁹ - 24 (~1GiB). On 32-bit systems, the maximum length is 2²⁸ - 16 (~512MiB).
• In Firefox, the maximum length is 2³⁰ - 2 (~2GiB). Before Firefox 65, the maximum length was 2²⁸ - 1 (~512MiB).
• In Safari, the maximum length is 2³¹ - 1 (~4GiB).

If you are working with large strings in other encodings (such as UTF-8 files or blobs), note that when you load the data into a JS string, the encoding always becomes UTF-16. The size of the string may be different from the size of the source file.

const str1 = "a".repeat(2 ** 29 - 24); // Success
const str2 = "a".repeat(2 ** 29 - 23); // RangeError: Invalid string length

const buffer = new Uint8Array(2 ** 29 - 24).fill("a".codePointAt(0)); // This buffer is 512MiB in size
const str = new TextDecoder().decode(buffer); // This string is 1GiB in size

For an empty string, length is 0.

The static property String.length is unrelated to the length of strings. It's the arity of the String function (loosely, the number of formal parameters it has), which is 1.

Since length counts code units instead of characters, if you want to get the number of characters, you can first split the string with its iterator, which iterates by characters:

function getCharacterLength(str) {
  // The string iterator that is used here iterates over characters,
  // not mere code units
  return [...str].length;
}

console.log(getCharacterLength("A\uD87E\uDC04Z")); // 3

If you want to count characters by grapheme clusters, use Intl.Segmenter. You can first pass the string you want to split to the segment() method, and then iterate over the returned Segments object to get the length:

function getGraphemeCount(str) {
  const segmenter = new Intl.Segmenter("en-US", { granularity: "grapheme" });
  // The Segments object iterator that is used here iterates over characters in grapheme clusters,
  // which may consist of multiple Unicode characters
  return [...segmenter.segment(str)].length;
}

console.log(getGraphemeCount("👨‍👩‍👧‍👧")); // 1

Because string is a primitive, attempting to assign a value to a string's length property has no observable effect, and will throw in strict mode.

const myString = "bluebells";

myString.length = 4;
console.log(myString); // "bluebells"
console.log(myString.length); // 9

• Array: length