<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body dir="ltr" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> أحمد المحمودي wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:20090623150409.GC5585@ants.selfip.net" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Hello,</pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Are you looking for the string size in characters or in bytes? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">---end quoted text--- Anyone of them is fine. </pre> </blockquote> Then allocate enough storage (character count * 4 ought to be enough), do the reordering + shaping, and then use strlen. That will give you number of bytes. Yes, if you need precise storage, you may need to copy the string again after that, but there is little that can be done about that. There is no way to know how much memory will be needed without actually performing the operations, so the only way to do this without temporary storage is to do it twice. This, typically, costs more than using temporary storage. Shachar <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.lingnu.com">http://www.lingnu.com</a> </pre> </body> </html>