length
- length
Returns the length in characters of the value of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, returns the length of
$_
. If EXPR is undefined, returnsundef
.This function cannot be used on an entire array or hash to find out how many elements these have. For that, use
scalar @array
andscalar 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 touse Encode
first). See Encode and perlunicode.