.. which tells me, that this the internal Perl representation of the string in UTF-8 encoding. What I am doing wrong!

Its unclear what you think is gong on

See perlunitut: Unicode in Perl

The default encoding is something like latin-1, its not utf-8, so you start with some latin-1 string, encode it as latin 1 (nothing changes), then you use length, and you're confused :)

See this , only once you "decode" do you have actual perl "unicode string" , until then its "binary" (latin1) 

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Devel::Peek;
use Data::Dump;
use Encode;
our $f = "K\366ln";

sub ff {
    dd($f);
    Dump($f);
}
ff ;
$f = encode('iso-8859-1', $f); # bytes encoded as latin1
ff ;
$f = encode('UTF-8', $f); # bytes encoded as utf8
ff ;
$f = decode('UTF-8', $f); # unicode string
ff ;
__END__
"K\xF6ln"
SV = PVNV(0xb18114) at 0x99b8f4
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0xada504 "K\366ln"\0
  CUR = 4
  LEN = 12
"K\xF6ln"
SV = PVNV(0xb18114) at 0x99b8f4
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0xb2f424 "K\366ln"\0
  CUR = 4
  LEN = 12
"K\xC3\xB6ln"
SV = PVNV(0xb18114) at 0x99b8f4
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0xb2f3dc "K\303\266ln"\0
  CUR = 5
  LEN = 12
"K\xF6ln"
SV = PVMG(0xacf3cc) at 0x99b8f4
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (SMG,POK,pIOK,pNOK,pPOK,UTF8)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0xb26374 "K\303\266ln"\0 [UTF8 "K\x{f6}ln"]
  CUR = 5
  LEN = 12
  MAGIC = 0xae478c
    MG_VIRTUAL = &PL_vtbl_utf8
    MG_TYPE = PERL_MAGIC_utf8(w)
    MG_LEN = 4

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In reply to Re: possible missunderstanding of package Encode by Anonymous Monk
in thread possible missunderstanding of package Encode by toohoo

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