> I don't understand why is this such a huge problem?

The (text-)string commands in Perl operate on a character and not byte basis. A string carries an internal utf8 flag which determines how it's handled.

Saying so, some commands like unpack or vec are supposed to operate on raw bit vectors and might be useful here.

*) i.e. variable byte length character

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

In reply to Re^2: truncate string to byte count by LanX
in thread truncate string to byte count by morgon

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