Since Perl 5.6, Perl has had Unicode support, which manifests itself as UTF-8 encoded strings. If you want to find out how many characters a string has, simply use length($string). It just works.

However, if, for some reason, you need to find out how many bytes a string uses (which may be different from how many UTF-8 characters the string has): 

use bytes;
my $len = bytes::length($string);

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Unless you know what you are doing, better steer clear of the latter. Use the former. (See perlunicode for more information.)

In reply to Re: How do I find the length of a string? by vrk
in thread How do I find the length of a string? by vroom

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