Turning a string into an integer, there is literally nothing to it in Perl since the string is a number if used as such. Turning a string into a BigInt is done with BigInt->new. OK.

I'm thinking I have a list of numbers and occasionally one might be too big to handle without loss of precision. So I'd like to make my strings into normal numbers or into BigInts if they are large. But, without doing a lot of work of parsing which is what's normally built-in, how do I tell if the number will fit into a normal integer?

On a practical basis, I can probably just use the length (how many digits). But I still wonder if there is any kind of more-transparant support for numbers to turn into bigint/bigfloat automatically like is planned for Perl 6, or if I overlooked some "smart" conversion function.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.