Why length() says this is 4 logical characters (I would expect it to say 1):
$ perl -lwe 'print length("")'
4
I guess something is wrong with my expectation. :-) What is it?
How does Perl's length() function counts unicode characters?
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1 Answers
Unless you tell Perl that the source code of the script is in utf8 Perl assumes ASCII. This means that by default the Perl interpreter sees as 4 separate characters. If you change your one liner to perl -Mutf8 -lwe 'print length("")' You see length providing your expected output.
The utf8 pragma tells Perl that the source unit is in utf8 and not ASCII. See perldoc utf8 for more info.
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