Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, this should be simple but...I need to count the number of characters set in the variable ($summary). My $summary variable takes the first 500 characters from another variable $text. Sometimes $text might be less than 500 characters so I need to count the number of characters that actually end up in the variable $summary. This is how I get the summary variable... 
$summary = substr($text, 0, 500);

Thanks.

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Re: Counting Characters
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 02, 2006 at 20:43 UTC

    Use length. Specifically, use length($summary).

    In context: 

    $text = '.'x400;
$summary = substr($text, 0, 500);
print(length($summary), "\n");    # 400

$text = '.'x500;
$summary = substr($text, 0, 500);
print(length($summary), "\n");    # 500

$text = '.'x600;
$summary = substr($text, 0, 500);
print(length($summary), "\n");    # 500

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      As an addendum -- in case it's not clear for the OP or others -- this works because substr used in the way described takes up to as many characters specified (e.g. 500 in this case). If used on a string shorter than the maximum length, there is no padding added at the end. Thus length works on the summary exactly as one would expect.

      -xdg

      Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

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Re: Counting Characters
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Mar 03, 2006 at 04:33 UTC
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Re: Counting Characters
by CountZero (Bishop) on Mar 02, 2006 at 21:02 UTC
    print scalar split '', $summary; or if you really want to count the number of characters: map {$count++} split '', $summary; print $count;

    Of course none of these is efficient, but if you really do not want to use the built-in length function, ...

    CountZero

    "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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      Don't forget about print $summary =~ y///c;.
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      or counting nibbles and dividing by two (bit fraught for multi-byte characters though):

      use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = '.'x400;
my $summary = substr($text, 0, 500);
print length(unpack 'H*', $summary) / 2, "\n";

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      Prints:

      400

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      DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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