How to count the length of a post title?

Let’s say that I have an entry titled Crime & Punishment

I tried to count the number of characters of my entry titles using the following line:

echo strlen( get_the_title() );

I expected the code would give me 18 characters for Crime & Punishment, but the result turned out to be 23 characters.

The code above didn’t give me my desired result since it reads the symbols within the title as a HTML code. Is there any workaround for such case?

There are actually two problems:

1. The & is encoded as &, so you have to use html_entity_decode() first.

2. Multi-byte characters need more than one byte, and strlen() will fail with them. Don’t use strlen().

So use something like this:

$title  = html_entity_decode( get_the_title(), ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8' );
$length = mb_strlen( $title, 'utf-8' );