There are a couple of cases where one can lose precision. If the user id is greater than 2**31 (signed integer on a 32 bit system), perl converts to floating point and precision may be lost.

The other possibility is that the user id is of the form a.b with b a long string of digits. This will be interpreted as a floating point number and depending on the precision, those extra digits will be rounded to fit into the floating point format.

If there are no decimal digits, I don't see how you can get into trouble with rounding operations in the string. To say more, we'd need to see examples of the user id.

-Mark

In reply to Re: "force string context"? by kvale
in thread "force string context"? by bronto

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