If you want to know the length of a string in PHP you would normally turn to the strlen() function which simply tells you the length of the string.

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$string = 'this is a string';
$strLength = strlen($string);

To use this to check the length of the string use the following example.

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$string = 'this is a string';
if(strlen($string)<20){
 // code here
}

A quicker way of looking at the length of a string would be to use the isset() function in conjunction with the curly braces {} used for locating character from a string.

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$string = 'this is a string';
if(!isset($string{20})){
 // stringtoo short
}

Because isset() is a language construct it works quicker than strlen() so this comparison has almost no overhead at all.