# Perl assumes it's a Latin-1 string
> perl -MEncode -wle print+length(qq(\x{c3}\x{a4}))
2

##</code><code>##

# Perl gets told to decode the string from UTF-8
> perl -MEncode -wle print+length(decode('UTF-8',qq(\x{c3}\x{a4})))
1

##</code><code>##

# My terminal is Latin-1, which happens to match Perls default assumption
> perl -MEncode -wle print(length(decode('Latin-1',qq(ä))))
1