I assume what you want to count is "Graphemes" (see also perluniintro). You should use Perl v5.12 or better; here are a couple of ways (see \X and \b{gcb}, as well as my post here):

my $string = "k\x{0301}u\x{032D}o\x{0304}\x{0301}n";
print "length: ",length($string),"\n"; # wrong way

my $len = () = $string=~/\X/g;
print "len: $len\n";

my @graphs  = split /\X\K(?=\X)/, $string;
print "graphs: ", 0+@graphs, "\n";

# in Perl v5.22+:
my @graphs2 = split /\b{gcb}/, $string;
print "graphs2: ", 0+@graphs2, "\n";

__END__

length: 8
len: 4
graphs: 4
graphs2: 4

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In reply to Re: Counting text with ligatures by haukex
in thread Counting text with ligatures by albert

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