There's no need for an "approx_equal" to do fancy floating point compare. You get the numbers from a split - so you have strings. Just use string compare and avoid the uncertainy problems you have with floating point compare.

At one point in the evolution of my response, I was relying on strings to avoid this problem. Three reasons I switched:

  1. The original post didn't make it clear that all numbers would have exactly one decimal point. If the row contained 305.10, did that count? How about 305.099?
  2. I can never remember if scalars keep both their string and numeric natures at the same time. After using a numeric comparison against a given scalar, is it now just a number, or are both kept around? (I could find out by research or experimentation, but the fact that I had to think about it, even after 10+ years of using Perl, makes me think that I should avoid this subtlety.)
  3. Finally, it was a way to throw in an educational tidbit "for free". The original author didn't specify the example very precisely; by including this in my response, it would hopefully help them think about it more clearly. (And/or I was showing off. You decide.)

In reply to Re^2: Seeking Algorithm by tkil
in thread Seeking Algorithm by WhiteBird

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