# Perl-intern, byte semantic
my $s = sprintf "%s", "\303\244\303\244",;
print length($s), "\n"; # number of bytes

# force character semantic
my @cp = unpack "U0U*", $s; # characters to codepoints
my $chr = pack "U0U*", @cp; # codepoints to characters
# jetzt betrachtet Perl die Zeichen nicht mehr als bytes
print length $chr; # number of characters