Determine size of string in bytes

[John Machin]

On Mar 28, 6:45 am, breal <hacker.steven... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Forgive me for this question which is most likely stupid...

The contents of your question are not stupid. The subject however does
invite a stupid answer like: len(the_string).

Disclaimer: I know nothing about SOAP except that it's usually
capitalised :-) Now read on:

> How do I determine the number of bytes a string takes up?  I have a
> soap server that is returning a serialized string.

Serialised how? UTF-8?

>  It seems that when
> the string goes over 65978 characters it does not return to the soap
> client.

Why does it seem so? How did you arrive at such a precise limit?

>  Instead I get an error:
> error: (35, 'Resource temporarily unavailable')

Is this error from the client or the server? Any error or logfile
record from the other side?

Is there anything in the documentation about maximum sizes?

>
> This makes me think the problem exists on the soap client side with
> some sort of max return length.

Think? Can't you verify this by inspecting the source?

> If I knew how many bytes the 65978
> character string was, then I could try to up this value.

How do you know the string is 65978 characters? If you are debugging
the server, can't you do len(serialise(the_65978_char_string))?

65978? Are you sure? Looks suspiciously close to 65535 aka 0xFFFF aka
(2 ** 16 - 1 ) to me.

If you have the server, you presumably have the source code for both
client and server. Some options for you:

(1) Look at the traceback(s), look at the source code, nut it out for
yourself. If there is some kind of max other than an implicit 16-bit
limitation in the client code, it shouldn't be too hard to find.

(2) Post the traceback(s) here, along with other details that might be
useful, like what SOAP server s/w you are using, what version of
Python, what platform.

HTH,

John