I'm confused, do you want to count the "bytes" or the "characters" in $data?

Update
I've never used read , but it seems you are using -s to get the size in bytes but read will attempt the size in Unicode characters because of the utf8 layer. Is this really what you want?

That's kind of a "creative" way to slurp a whole file...

Anyway to answer the title's question

Remove temporarily the utf8 flag and use length then.

While I doubt that's what you want, others might stumble over this thread asking exactly this.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re: Counting bytes in a Unicode document by LanX
in thread Counting bytes in a Unicode document by jwkrahn

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