Question: I am working with std::wstring variables (C++ Language) & I am trying to determine the length(in characters) of the string.

The functions .length & .size() give results that aren't the length in characters(I think they tell me how many wide chars there are?).

**So is there a way to determine the length in characters of a wstring?**

Answer: 
To do this you must use the Unicode database. You should use ICU ([how to do it in ICU](http://userguide.icu-project.org/boundaryanalysis)) or some other Unicode library. Boost.Locale is already accepted to boost and will be available soon, it wraps some of the functionality of ICU in a nice way.

However, I doubt you actually need to do this. See [definitions of grapheme, character, codepoint, codeunit](http://unicode.org/glossary/). Probably what you mean is codepoints, but almost surely it's not very useful.
Are you looking for wcslen?

```
#include <wchar.h>
size_t wcslen(const wchar_t *s);

```