#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.014;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use strict;
use warnings;

open(HDL,"./test.txt");
my $string = <HDL>;
chomp($string);
print length($string)."\n";
print "$string\n";

------------------
~# cat test.txt 
é
~# ./test.pl
2
é