You have an older Camel.

The latest edition says ...

length

    length EXPR

    length

The function returns the length in characters of the scalar value EXPR.

(Emphasis mine.)

And then goes on to say ...

To find the length of a string in bytes rather than characters, say:

    $blen = do { use bytes; length $string; };

or:

    $blen = bytes::length($string); # must use bytes first

perldoc -f length in recent Perls (5.6+) say something similar thanks to the introduction of Unicode/UTF8 support.

    --k.