character_length for utf8

We are working on utf8 characters and using following test case to find number of characters or string length: create table test(col varchar(50)); select col, length(col), character_length(col), substr(col,1,3),substr(col,1,1), col[1,3] from test; 南大街 9 9 南 � 南 abc 3 3 abc a abc ab大 5 5 ab� a ab� The results we are getting are number of bytes consumed by a string rather number of characters. Is ther any solution to get number of characters in a string? Here are additional properties used in JDBC URL: NEWCODESET=UTF8,8859-1,819;IFX_USE_STRENC=true Informix Version; IDS 11.5