Hi to all !

I thought I'd understood a little of character encoding ... But now I'm completely lost :

Given these 2 minimal "scripts" : (you should see 5 e-accutes in the strings )

cat miniUTF8.pl
print 'ייייי ' , length 'ייייי' , "\n";

cat miniUTF8-2.pl
use utf8;
print 'ייייי' , length 'ייייי' , "\n";

[download]
When I run the first one, I see 5 splendid e-acutes, but length is said 10

When I run the second one, I see 5 question marks, but the length is 5

All this is done on a macbook pro, perl 5.14.2, locale on next lines, in the terminal window. The preferences of terminal are set for "UTF-8" encoding (that's why cat give good results) 

LANG="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

[download]
Next line : an hexadecimal dump of the "print" line: One clearly sees it's utf8 encoded (0xa9c3 is e-acute) 

od -x miniUTF8.pl
0000000      7270    6e69    2074    c327    c3a9    c3a9    c3a9    c
+3a9
0000020      20a9    2027    2c09    6c20    6e65    7467    2068    c
+327
0000040      c3a9    c3a9    c3a9    c3a9    27a9    2c20    2020    5
+c22
0000060      226e    0a3b                                             
+   
0000064

[download]
Any idea or explanation is welcome !!

Didier

In reply to minimalist perl-utf8 question by didess

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