I just realized that most strings won't have most characters in them so this can be sped up significantly via: 

my $count= 0;
for( keys %{ { map {$_,1} unpack "C*", $str } }  ){
    my $c= pack "C", $_;
    $count += () = $str =~ /\Q$c\E/g;
}

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        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re2: Counting number of characters in a string by tye
in thread Counting number of characters in a string by jeffpflueger

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