Note, BTW, that with the Wonderful World of utf8, the number of characters in $message and it's size in bytes are not neccessarly the same. The above normaly gives the length in characters; to get the length in bytes,

   use bytes ();
   ...
   $sizeof=bytes::length($message);
[download]

But remember that doesn't count all the overhead of a scalar. (28 bytes on most boxes, IIRC, but there are very few circumstances where you should care.)

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Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.

Update: Fixed tpyos.