• first part: duplicate of this issue
• second part is unclear:
  • "Final test is incorrect" -> how so ? can you provide an example ?
  • "Assertions aren't even on for whatever reason" what does that mean ? please be more precise

Your task is to shorten the code as much as possible in order to meet the strict character count requirements of the Kata. (no more than 161)

this is what the countChar test does, although I agree that the assertion message is really poor. your current code has 394 characters

Those numbers are the length of a side of a square. A square can be defined with only one number because all sides have the same length.

You will return a collection or a string (depending on the language; Shell bash, PowerShell, Pascal and Fortran return a string) with the size of each of the squares.