You have basically 2 ways of dealing with this: only allow submissions in latin-1 (which is the default perl character encoding) using the "accept-charset" property on the <form> tag, or make sure perl knows about your encoding:

use Encode qw(decode);
my $real_string = decode("utf8",$input_string); #assumes $input string
+ is in UTF-8 encoding
print "string is ".lenght($real_string)." characters\n"; # length() no
+w interprets $real_string in character instead of bytes.
[download]

(...) only allow submissions in latin-1 (which is the default perl character encoding) using the "accept-charset" property on the <form> tag (...)

That's a reasonable solution, so long as you keep in mind that characters beyond latin-1 will be submitted as encoded entities (e.g. &#321;). Taking that into account in length calculations is a *lot* harder than consistently using utf8 across the board.

True enough, Perl's unicode support is pretty good, but if your input is "encodable" in latin-1, it will still save you a lot of headaches to use latin instead of unicode if you work with remote applications like databases - DBD::mysql's utf8 support is still extremely unreliable for instance.

edit: Oh and also note that there is no standard for encoding characters outside the accepted charset: most popular browsers use the &#NUMBER; encoding, but not all of them do. See the replies to Unicode characters in <code> blocks for example

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

I'm confused. There are 40 characters in that string!

Note too that the characters you have posted render as utf-8 characters (at least for me).

The following may help however:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;

my $str = "הההההההההההההההההההההההההההההההההההההההה";

print 'Raw: ' . length $str;
print "\nDecoded: " . length decode ('utf8', $str);
[download]

Prints:

Raw: 80
Decoded: 40
[download]

If the encoding you are using really is latin1 then using decode ('iso-8859-1', $str) may turn the trick for you.

ah stupid me... sorry i meant 40 but results in 80, not 20 to 40 :) thanks for the input guys i'm gonna look into your help a little more and see how this works out, thanks again.