#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Devel::Peek;
use charnames qw( :full );

my $text = "\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE}";
print length $text;

Dump $text;

__END__
C:\test>junk.pl
1
SV = PVMG(0x27fea8) at 0x237ab8
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADMY,SMG,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0x3c78e8 "\303\251"\0 [UTF8 "\x{e9}"]
  CUR = 2
  LEN = 8
  MAGIC = 0x23c648
    MG_VIRTUAL = &PL_vtbl_utf8
    MG_TYPE = PERL_MAGIC_utf8(w)
    MG_LEN = 1