Bug#619214: perldoc -f length wrong about characters

[jidanni at jidanni.org]

Package: perl-doc
Version: 5.10.1-18
Severity: wishlist

It says
               Note the characters: if the EXPR is in Unicode, you will get the number of characters, not
               the number of bytes.

But I prove it wrong below.

$ perldoc -f length
       length EXPR
       length  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 of the internal string in bytes, use
               "bytes::length(EXPR)", see bytes.  Note that the internal encoding is variable, and the
               number of bytes usually meaningless.  To get the number of bytes that the string would have
               when encoded as UTF-8, use "length(Encoding::encode_utf8(EXPR))".
$ perl -wle 'print length "網路；"'
9
$ perl -wle 'print length "網路"'
6