Counting charcters

Hi all,

I am learning shell scripts. I need to do some
validations. TO do that I need to count the chars in a
given word. Could you help me in that ?

1) Accept the word from user ( I can do this :))

2) count the characters in the given word and store the
number in a variable.

3) Display the content of the variable ?

wc -c counts including end of the line or word char. How
to avoid this ?

I am using sun solaris 5.8


Thanks in advance
Gururaj