manually finding the size of a block of text (ASCII format)

Question

Is there an easy way to manually (ie. not through code) find the size (in bytes, KB, etc) of a block of selected text? Currently I am taking the text, cutting/pasting into a new text document, saving it, then clicking "properties" to get an estimate of the size.

I am developing mainly in visual studio 2008 but I need any sort of simple way to manually do this.

Note: I understand this is not specifically a programming question but it's related to programming. I need this to compare a few functions and see which one is returning the smallest amount of text. I only need to do it a few times so figured writing a method for it would be overkill.

Answer 1

I don't see the difference between using the code written by the app you're pasting into, and using some other code. Being a python person myself, whenever I want to check length of some text I just do it in the interactive interpreter. Surely some equivalent solution more suited to your tastes would be appropriate?

Answer 2

This question isn't meaningful as asked. Text can be encoded in different formats; ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc. The memory consumed by a block of text depends on which encoding you decide to use for it.

EDIT: To answer the question you've stated now (how do I determine which function is returning a "smaller" block of text) -- given a single encoding, the shorter text will almost always be smaller as well. Why can't you just compare the lengths?

In your comment you mention it's ASCII. In that case, it'll be one byte per character.

Answer 3

ended up just cutting/pasting the text into MS Word and using the char count feature in there