[TxMt] How to echo the character count of a captured tabstop in a snippet?

[Derek Jones]

I'm looking for a way for a snippet to perform a transformation on a  
tab stop, but to output the number characters, not to modify the  
captured tab stop.  Can anyone think of how this would be done?   
Example:  A tab trigger for the PHP function strncmp(), and when I  
type 'string', the third argument would update to the total number of  
characters in the string.

	strncmp($$1, '$2', <character count of $2>)

giving me:

	strncmp($foo, 'string', 6)

-Derek