There are two ways that perl 5 stores strings. If the UTF8 flag is set, length returns the number of characters, not bytes.

If the flag is not set, perl assumes that the encoding is ISO-8859-1, and there the number of bytes is equal to the number of characters.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

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

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