Q:

Python : Get size of string in bytes

I have a string that is to be sent over a network. I need to check the total bytes it is represented in.
sys.getsizeof(string_name) returns extra bytes. For example for sys.getsizeof("a") returns 22 , while one character is only represented in 1 byte in python. Is there some other method to find this ?

A:

If you want the number of bytes in a string, this function should do it for you pretty solidly. 
def utf8len(s):
    return len(s.encode('utf-8'))

The reason you got weird numbers is because encapsulated in a string is a bunch of other information due to the fact that strings are actual objects in python. 
Its interesting because if you look at my solution to encode the string into 'utf-8', there's an 'encode' method on the 's' object (which is a string). Well, it needs to be stored somewhere right? Hence, the higher than normal byte count. Its including that method, along with a few others :).

A:

There's a caveat to the accepted answer. 
For some multi-byte encodings (e.g. utf-16), string.encode will add a Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the start, which is a sequence of special bytes that inform the reader on the byte endianness used. So the length you get is actually len(BOM) + len(encoded_word).
If you don't want to count the BOM bytes, you can use either the little-endian version of the encoding (adding the suffix "-le") or the big-endian version (adding the suffix "be").
>>> len('ciao'.encode('utf-16'))
10
>>> len('ciao'.encode('utf-16-le'))
8

