Hi there Perlmonks! while gathering experience I tumbled over the Data Dumper package which just provides some interesting features. However while giving me single values of a certain line from a dat document, it can only return strings values. But unfortunately I need the number as a numerical value to further process it. Thats where I am struggeling. Here the code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $resultnow='C:/Users/user/Desktop/solution.dat';

open (FILE, '<', $resultnow) or die "$resultnow File not found : $!";
my @lines = <FILE>;

my $valuenow= $lines[9];

my @items=split' ',$valuenow;



use Data::Dumper;



#print Dumper(@items);
my $val=Dumper($items[-1]);


print $val;

close (FILE);

[download]
In this case the value he is extracting is: -39.9999400000. but he marks it as a string '-39.9999400000'. But I would like to insert it in an equation to calculate something. So I need somehow a conversion or an alternative. Thank you again very much for your attention and help! Best regards

In reply to string to number via data dumper by semipro

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