Adding a class to post title considering the title length

Question

I searched for "title length" in questions but results were all about setting max length and limiting and..

What I want to do is to create an if-statement, to determine if the post title has more than 68 characters or not and if it had, add smaller class to it.

I wrote the code like this:

<?php
    $permaLength = strlen(the_title());
?>
<h2 class="<?php if ($permaLength > 68) {echo 'smaller';} ?>">
    <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
        <?php the_title(); ?>
    </a>
</h2>

but it seems that the_title() function is not returning the value and instead it's echoing out. Is there an alternative way to fetch the title length?

Answer 1

the_title() echoes the result. Use get_the_title() to return the title.