$len($1-) would be the length of the message, including spaces and color codes, but with multiple spaces trimmed out. Using $parms instead of $1- counts all the extra spaces padding they might use.

For your flooding monitor, you could have messages count as more-than-one message if they meet some of your flags, such as being too long.

If you're wanting to flag certain kind of text, that would depend on what you mean by emotes. Are you talking about doing things like ":)" or using emoji characters that are visible only in certain fonts like "Segoi UI Symbol" where this shows the black cat emoji:

Code:
//echo -a $chr(55357) $+ $chr(56369)