Measure strings using their character count

Paul Hudson      @twostraws

In Swift 2.2 the way strings are measured changed yet again. What was countElements() became count() in Swift 1.1, and in Swift 2.0 was removed entirely.

Instead, you should access the characters property of your String, then call count on that, like this:

let string = "Hello, Swift!"
let count = string.characters.count
print(count)

Note: This has changed in later versions of Swift – you should access the count property of strings directly.

Other changes in Swift 2.0…

• Throwing errors
• Use the guard keyword for early returns
• Use the defer keyword to delay work until your scope exits
• Mutability warnings
• Checking API availability

Download all Swift 2.0 changes as a playground Link to Swift 2.0 changes

Browse changes in all Swift versions