How do I get the length of a string in Perl?

Question

What is the Perl equivalent of strlen()?

Answer 1

Although 'length()' is the correct answer that should be used in any sane code, Abigail's length horror should be mentioned, if only for the sake of Perl lore.

Basically, the trick consists of using the return value of the catch-all transliteration operator:

print "foo" =~ y===c;   # prints 3

y///c replaces all characters with themselves (thanks to the complement option 'c'), and returns the number of character replaced (so, effectively, the length of the string).