How do I count the characters, words, and lines in a file, using Perl?

Question

What is a good/best way to count the number of characters, words, and lines of a text file using Perl (without using wc)?

Answer 1

To be able to count CHARS and not bytes, consider this:
(Try it with Chinese or Cyrillic letters and file saved in utf8)

use utf8;

my $file='file.txt';
my $LAYER = ':encoding(UTF-8)';
open( my $fh, '<', $file )
  || die( "$file couldn't be opened: $!" );
binmode( $fh, $LAYER );
read $fh, my $txt, -s $file;
close $fh;

print length $txt,$/;
use bytes;
print length $txt,$/;