How to find the amount of characters in a string?

[inuasha]

How would I find the amount of characters in a string and then use that to print a certain amount of some character that you choose. For example:

a = 'string' # this holds 6 characters
print '*' * # amount of characters in string

[Gribouillis]

Perhaps you mean

>>> len('string')
6

[inuasha]

Thanks I have not been doing much work with strings latley I feel stupid now. Thanks for helping me though