len isn't a great example because it doesn't do anything remotely useful on python3 strs in the general case. In particular it doesn't tell you how many charact

len isn't a great example because it doesn't do anything remotely useful on python3 strs in the general case. In particular it doesn't tell you how many characters the str has, which is what you probably wanted to know -- possibly as an approximation for figuring out how many columns in fixed-width it would take, in which case of course you are even more likely to be disappointed. In python2 len(str) will tell you exactly how many bytes some text takes, which is useful.