I don’t know what all that Microsoft noise was for — nor the use utf8 either for that matter — but we’re all perfectly familiar with “the Unicode bug” thank you very much.

And we are also aware of how unlikely it is to a problem for Jim given the data samples he displayed. 

% perl -CS -E 'say chr(0xe9)' | perl -CS -nE 'require bytes;  say byte
+s::length($_); chomp; say bytes::length($_)'
3
2

% perl -E '$x = "\x{e9}\x{3b1}"; require bytes; say bytes::length($x);
+ chop $x; say bytes::length($x)'
4
2

% perl -E '$x = "\N{U+E9}"; require bytes; say bytes::length($x)'
2

[download]
As you can plainly see, it’s only your own isolated little byte constants that can switch internal representation. All you have to do is ever once have a code point greater than 255 anywhere in the string and it stops being a byte string. You also won’t have a problem if you’ve read in the utf8 from something whose encoding layer is set to utf8. So if he has either of those in his program — which it looks like he does — he can ignore Chicken Little.

It won’t bother him. I’ll bet.

In reply to Re^4: Best Way to Get Length of UTF-8 String in Bytes? by tchrist
in thread Best Way to Get Length of UTF-8 String in Bytes? by Jim

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