Thanks for clarification!
I tested it with Bash script:
chars=$(wc -m mylog|cut -d ' ' -f1)
lines=$(wc -l mylog|cut -d ' ' -f1)
let chars=$chars - $lines
echo $chars
and got the same number as given by vim
:%s/.//gn
(Which was place from what I got confused.)
Hopefully this bug description
Note, that UTF-8 characters can be counted by counting bytes with bit
patterns 0xxx or 11xx:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description
So, general logic should be, that, if:
a) locale setting is utf-8 (e.g. LANG=xx_XX.UTF-8), or
b) first two bytes of file are 0xFE 0xFF
