I have a &bvar that contains unicode/utf-8 text, is there a way to get the length of text; that is the number of characters without having to loop over its entirety examining chunks of text
In this case you might need to use $bvar(&binvar,N,M).text where each subsequent N is M+1, and each M is calculated by jumping ahead $maxlenl bytes then finding the next byte value that's not in the 128-191 range.