Counting characters in a UTF-8 file
Use -m or --chars option.
For example (text file contains two Korean characters and newline):
falsetru@jmlee12:~$ cat text안녕falsetru@jmlee12:~$ wc -c text7 textfalsetru@jmlee12:~$ wc -m text3 textAccording to wc(1):
-c, --bytes print the byte counts -m, --chars print the character counts
Don't confuse chars, chars and bytes. A byte is 8 bits long, and -c counts bytes in your file whatever you put in. A char in many programming languages is also 8 bits long this is why counting bytes uses -c! If you want to count how many characters (chars) of a given alphabet you have in a file, then you need to specify in some way which encoding of chars have been used, and sometimes, that encoding uses more than a byte for a char. Read the manual for wc, it will tell you that -m will use you current locale (roughly your language/charset preferences) to decode the file and count your chars.