Statement Handle Attribute Precision

Using mariadb 10 series,
Perl 5.18
DBI 1.623
DBD-mysql 4.20

I seem to be getting 3 byte 'PRECISION' back on the statement handle for 
CHAR and VARCHAR field, so if its supposed to be 35 character length, we 
get 105 back, before some updates to our server it was returning 35 
byte; so 1byte per character.
Have checked that the server, table and column are all indeed latin1 and 
not UTF-8,

even checked mariadb information_schema.COLUMNS and it says 
CHARACTER_OCTET_LENGTH=35 for that column.

was trying to figure out how DBI gets the information to populate PRECISION?

Any help would be appreciated.