Use Devel::Peek and Dump $body->{"timeout"} before and after print. Look at the part called pv. I'm afraid this is what a lot of JSON encoders do, they try to guess whether something is a number by looking to see if your scalar has a pv (has been used in string context) or not. printing your scalar causes the pv to be created.

Some modules (e.g., DBD::Oracle and DBD::ODBC) have had code added to them to allow an attribute to be specified to remove the pv when fetching numbers from a database but this is XS code. I'm unsure how you do it in pure perl but there is bound to be a way.

In reply to Re: Peculiar incident: printing a variable changes its type by mje
in thread Peculiar incident: printing a variable changes its type by mkhan

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