length - return the number of bytes in a string

- NAME
- SYNOPSIS
- DESCRIPTION

# NAME

length - return the number of bytes in a string

# SYNOPSIS

length EXPR

length

# DESCRIPTION

Returns the length in characters of the value of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, returns length of `$_`. Note that this 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.

Note the characters: if the EXPR is in Unicode, you will get the number of characters, not the number of bytes. To get the length in bytes, use `do { use bytes; length(EXPR) }`, see the bytes manpage.

length - return the number of bytes in a string