At least on Perl 5.14 and Perl 5.20, this doesn't work (and I don't understand why):

use strict;
use charnames ":full";

my $string = "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}";
print "length: ",length($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";

__END__

length: 1
len: 1
graphs: 1

[download]

Is maybe our understanding of graphemes different from the separate letters of the ligatures?

In reply to Re^2: Counting text with ligatures by Corion
in thread Counting text with ligatures by albert

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