Oh monks most exalted and wise, a humble novice seeks to benefit from your vast knowledge of all things Perl.

I have a text file (UTF8-encoded) containing words, one per line, and I'm interested in finding out, for each word, how many characters are in it that do not appear in the English alphabet. So I whipped up a script to find out: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use open IO => ':utf8';

while(<>) {
  chomp;
  ($nonenglish = $_) =~ s/[A-Za-z]//g;
  print length($nonenglish), " $nonenglish\n";
}

[download]

Alas, it isn't working; length appears to be counting bytes rather than characters! To wit: 

$ perl nonenglish.pl
æ
2 æ
&#42853;
3 &#42853;
&#173782;
4 &#173782;
^D
$

[download]

I only occasionally use Perl, and I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Enlighten me, kind monks, I beseech you!

My Perl is 5.14.2, BTW (and I cannot easily upgrade).

In reply to length() miscounting UTF8 characters? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
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