Then why does the string "65" print out "ok"? I didn't eval or convert it first.

Because 65 looks like a number but 0x65 does not. See perlnumber, http://perldoc.perl.org/perlapi.html#grok_number_flags (the meat of http://perldoc.perl.org/perlapi.html#looks_like_number, maybe even on truthiness

You can always change this with overload::constant, Numification of strings

In reply to Re^3: why are hex strings not numbers? by Anonymous Monk
in thread why are hex values not numbers? by perl-diddler

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