Returns the length in characters of the value of EXPR. If EXPR is
omitted, returns length of $_
. If EXPR is undefined, returns undef
.
This function cannot be used on an entire array or hash to find out how
many elements these have. For that, use scalar @array
and scalar keys
%hash
, respectively.
Like all Perl character operations, length() normally deals in logical
characters, not physical bytes. For how many bytes a string encoded as
UTF-8 would take up, use length(Encode::encode_utf8(EXPR))
(you'll have
to use Encode
first). See Encode and perlunicode.