It depends... sometimes you do have to decode them, sometimes you don't, because Perl (or some module etc.) has already done it for you.

In any case, for Perl to be able to work with character strings (as opposed to byte/octet strings), the string must have been decoded somehow into Perl's internal Unicode representation.

In reply to Re^3: How does the built-in function length work? by Eliya
in thread How does the built-in function length work? by PerlOnTheWay

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