or counting nibbles and dividing by two (bit fraught for multi-byte characters though):

use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = '.'x400;
my $summary = substr($text, 0, 500);
print length(unpack 'H*', $summary) / 2, "\n";

[download]

Prints:

400

[download]
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re^2: Counting Characters by GrandFather
in thread Counting Characters by Anonymous Monk

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