No reason why I used 1 instead of 0, other than to avoid using \0 and spoil the symetry. Your way is right, too. If there are no zero chars in the string, it doesn't matter.

use utf8; does more than allow UTF-8 characters to be in the source file (in strings and even for identifier names!). After all, there weren't any, so I didn't include it for that purpose. Dig a little deeper, or try leaving it out and see what happens (after knowing the original works OK (fixed typos, agrees with your data format, etc.)).

The chart: I don't use a chart, but I can convert to/from UTF-8 on a whiteboard. Can you? Look at the reason for the numbers, not just at the numbers, in binary. Go back to the original source document on UTF-8 if it's not explained in the Perl docs. You can find it at unicode.org, or in the back of the book if you own a copy.

Matching multibyte chars explicitly: I did that years ago and wished for better. Now, it's unnecessary. Why would you need to do that?

++$char{$&} while (/[^\0-\x{7f}]/g);
[download]

Your if statement will only ++ the total for the first offending character it finds in a line.

Unsure of unpack: You're not calling it in your sample, so I don't know what you mean. Leftover from another test-run, I suppose. You might be thinking:

foreach (unpack "U*") {
   ++$chars{$_}  if (ord($_) > 127);
   }

# ... later
while (my ($ch, $count)= each %chars) {
   printf "character U+%04x seen $count times.\n", $ch;
   }
[download]

Keep it up!

—John

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