Does Rust’s String have a method that returns the number of characters rather than the number of bytes?

Is there any method on String that returns the characters count, aside from the one I am using above?

No. Using s.chars().count() is correct. Note that this is an O(N) operation (because UTF-8 is complex) while getting the number of bytes is an O(1) operation.

You can see all the methods on str for yourself.

As pointed out in the comments, a char is a specific concept:

It’s important to remember that char represents a Unicode Scalar Value, and may not match your idea of what a ‘character’ is. Iteration over grapheme clusters may be what you actually want.

One such example is with precomposed characters:

fn main() {
    println!("{}", "é".chars().count()); // 2
    println!("{}", "é".chars().count()); // 1
}

You may prefer to use graphemes from the unicode-segmentation crate instead:

use unicode_segmentation::UnicodeSegmentation; // 1.6.0

fn main() {
    println!("{}", "é".graphemes(true).count()); // 1
    println!("{}", "é".graphemes(true).count()); // 1
}