Bare Basic question.

[stirfries]

Hello Experts,

I tried googling to get more information about comparison operators in Perl when incompatible data types were involved but wasn't lucky.

I am basically a Java programmer but have been looking at Perl code of late, at work. While debugging a Perl module, I stumbled upon the following code block. I understand Perl has distinct comparison operators for numeric and string data types. But, I am not sure how this works.

use constant UNSUBSCRIBE => 0;

my ($value) = 'n';
if ($value == UNSUBSCRIBE) {
	print 'n equals 0';
}

When I run this code block, surprisingly the output of the above code block is 'n equals 0'.

I am not sure how a character ('n') be equal to a numeric number (0). Even the ASCII character value of character ('n') is not 0. Can some Perl guru help me understand what is going on?

Thanks,

[KevinADC]

"n" evaluates to 0 (zero) in that context. Do this and the results will be different:

use constant UNSUBSCRIBE => 1;
 
my ($value) = 'n';
if ($value == UNSUBSCRIBE) {
    print 'n equals 0';
}

When a string is compared (and maybe even evaluated) in numeric context perl assigns it a value of 0 (zero). I assume thats because the value (in that context) is false, and in perl 0 equates to false.

[KevinADC]

if you use the warnings pragma

use warnings;

and you should almost always use it, you would have been alerted to part of the problem:

Argument "n" isn't numeric in numeric equal (==) at line .....

if you use the diagnostics module you will get an even more verbose message:

use diagnostics;

but it still might not have explained it fully.

[stirfries]

When a string is compared (and maybe even evaluated) in numeric context perl assigns it a value of 0 (zero). I assume thats because the value (in that context) is false, and in perl 0 equates to false.

KevinADC,

That was the explanation I was looking for. I was under the assumption that Perl would convert it to its ASCII value like C language does. Apparently, it does not. Thanks for the expert reply. Appreciate it.

Thanks,

[mlpkumar]

below code will give you the output what you expected.


use constant UNSUBSCRIBE => 0;

my ($value) = 'n';
if ($value eq UNSUBSCRIBE) {
print 'n equals 0';
}

[Icecrack]

below code will give you the output what you expected.


use constant UNSUBSCRIBE => 0;

my ($value) = 'n';
if ($value eq UNSUBSCRIBE) {
print 'n equals 0';
}

mlpkumar if your going to help people please use code tags as the posting guidelines say,


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