Hi nandymamith,

• $a = ''; $b = {};
  You really don't want to use $a and $b which are aliases for the two operands being compared in a sortsub.
• That been said, $a and $b in above are two different things in perl. While $a is an empty scalar variable, $b is a reference to an anonymous hash, created using curly brackets which is empty in this case

However, in this case, you can compare these, printing what you want like so:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $empty_str = q{};
my $empty_hash_ref = { q{} => q{}, };

for ( keys %$empty_hash_ref ) {
    $empty_str eq $_ ? print "PASS" : print "FAIL";  ## print PASS
}

## use smartmarch ~~
$empty_str ~~ $empty_hash_ref ? print "PASS" : print "FAIL"; ## print 
+PASS
[download]

• Note however, that iterating through the hash comparing either the keys or values of the hash with the empty scalar variable, when the hash is empty ( with no variable atall) will print nothing, but using the smart match ~~ Operator will print "FAIL"
.

  my $empty_str = q{};
  my $empty_hash_ref = {};  ## why?

   for (keys %$empty_hash_ref){
       $empty_str eq $_? print "PASS": print "FAIL"; # print nothing
   }

   $empty_str~~$empty_hash_ref?print "PASS": print "FAIL"; # print FAI
+L
[download]