Thanks, that looks like it will work.

Something rubs me the wrong way about using pack, though. I'm getting the length of a document, which could be a very large document -- so seems very inefficient (compred to just somehow fetching the current length from the SV).

I need to find time to learn more about utf-8/unicode support in Perl. For example, looking at Devel::Peek output the SV has the CUR length, which is what I want. I wonder if length() on a UTF string requires counting up the chars each time it's used or if the character length is also stored in the SV.

Thanks for the help,

BTW -- is there any trick for conditionally using a pragma like use bytes; in an older Perl?