max length of powerhshell string?

Question

In the docs it says that a string in powershell is a fixed length but it doesn't say how long it is.

I need to now that to be able to determine if I Can use a string in my code

Answer 1

$s='hello'
$s.length

That is its length.

A string is recreated if you add to it:

$s+='World'
$s.Length

Make a big string"

PS > $s='X' * 1Mb
PS  $s.Length
1048576

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Answer 2

Hi,

as jrv pointed out Strings in PowerShell (and most of the other programming languages) are of "Fixed length" or immutable (they cannot change). .net also offers a mutable string object System.Text.StringBuilder, which should be your preference if you change the string a lot through out its lifetime, since it does not re-create the object when you add to it:

$s = New-Object Text.StringBuilder "test"
[void]$s.Append(" more")
$s.ToString()

The theoretical  max length of a String is 2147483647, but you are more likely to run out of memory before you ever reach that limit.

Answer 3

This will show the maximum length

$s = New-Object Text.StringBuilder "test"
$s.MaxCapacity

PS C:\Windows\system32> $s = New-Object Text.StringBuilder "test"
$s.MaxCapacity
2147483647

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Regards Chen V [MCTS SharePoint 2010]

Answer 4

dotNet defines a string as this in th constructor:

String(char c,Int32 length)

dotNet:

[Int32]::Maxvalue
2147483647

t=That is: (2^31) - 1

The string needs to fit in memory.  Do you have 2.1 Gb to spare?

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Answer 5

Suggestion.  If you need to manipulate very large strings consider using file IO.  Stream is good but a memeory mapped file Is more efficient.

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯