I have a text file which contains typographic ligatures such as "ff" and "ffi". How do I get the length as "1" for each ligature, rather than 2 for "ff" and 3 for "ffi", etc. 
$char = "ffi";
$len = length($char);

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In preview, I see that my "ffi" is getting encoded as & #64259, so can't properly make the example. Here is my sample code formatted as tt.

$char = "ffi";
$len = length($char);

How do I get $len as 1 in this example?

In reply to Counting text with ligatures by albert

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