The NLENG function returns a single numeric value that is the size in bytes of each element in matrix. All matrix elements have the same size. For English text, this size is also the number of characters that can be stored in a matrix element.

If the matrix does not have a value, then the NLENG function returns a value of 0. This function is different from the LENGTH function, which returns the size of each element of a character matrix, omitting the trailing blanks.

The following statements demonstrate the NLENG function:

m = {"ab " "ijklm  ",
     "x"   " "       };
len = nleng(m);
print len;