LlGetListLength

Returns an integer that is the number of elements in the list src.

• The LSL compiler will not optimize the condition, it will not hoisting this function out of the condition. Unless strictly necessary all work with strings, keys and lists should be manually hoisted and performed outside of the loop. See Best Practices for more details.

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//Basic usage
default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        list l = ["one", "two", "three"];
        integer i = llGetListLength(l);
        llOwnerSay("there are " + (string)i + " entries in the list");
    }
}

Best Practices

When using list length to help you loop through a list, it is better to determine the length first, then start your loop:

 
integer i = 0;
integer length = llGetListLength(mylist);
for (; i < length; ++i) {
    llSay(0, llList2String(mylist, i));
}
 

The following example is to illustrate what not to do, it calculates the length in the "for" loop and is inefficient because the length gets recalculated at each pass through the loop. This should only ever be done if the list is in fact changing (in length) with each iteration of the loop^[1].

 
integer i;
for (i = 0; i < llGetListLength(mylist); ++i) {
    llSay(0, llList2String(mylist, i));
}
 

Optimizations

A faster and lighter (in bytecode) way to determine the length of a list is to do a not-equals compare with a null list. This works because the list not-equals compare returns the difference between the lengths.

 
list in;
integer len_in = llGetListLength(in);
integer flen_in = (in != []);
//flen_in and len_in will be the same
 
integer neg_len_in = -llGetListLength(in);
integer fneg_len_in = ([] != in);
//fneg_len_in and neg_len_in will be the same
 

Functions

Issues

Source

Footnotes