I'm not trying to be dense, but that's the way Perl looks at things. If you want to pass integers in, but treat them as strings, the easiest way I can think of it to pass a second variable in that would tell you if this scalar is to be viewed as an integer or string.

Of course, I would personally write two functions, one for integers and one for strings. Then, you decide outside the function which to do. Right now, you've got a function doing two different things. Make each do one thing and one thing well.

You can tell this really easily if your function has the form:

sub foo {
    my ($a, $b, $c) = @_;

    if ($a == 1) {
        # Do something
    } else {
        # Do something else
    }
}
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