Practically, speaking, yes. Literally, however, no. It's more like:

length_of()
{
  echo $1 | wc -c
}
length_of some-string
[download]

The only time this is important is if some-string has spaces, wildcards, etc. You put single quotes around the string, which would prevent any of this from happening, while the OP didn't use quotes, thus shell metacharacters would be expanded.

That said, I'm betting that the OP wasn't counting on any of this, and that your shell code gets closer to what the OP really wanted anyway.

Also, the OP's code does work on Windows while yours, well, doesn't, unless you install the Cygwin tools or something. ;-) Not sure if that's important to parv or not.