I think you miss the point of some the wackier answers. Perl is expressive, which allows one to pursue a little creativity. I am not saying that most of the "creative" answers are worth considering as solutions to the task at hand, their worth lies in the creative play that brought them forth and in any creativity they might inspire in others. I seriously doubt anyone is pushing for XP in these cases (and often as not they are posted anonymously anyway). Chaos and creativity are good things in moderation :-)

Besides, everyone knows that the best way to obtain the length of a string is:

my $len = 0;
$string =~ s/(.)/q|'$len++;$1'|/gimmesomesex;
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