Dear Perl Monks, I am currently in the process of writing a custom "diff" utility for comparing two text files field-by-field, for reasons that I will omit here. One thing I need to do is generic equality checking - use "==" for numeric comparisons, and "eq" for strings, since the fields contain different data types, and sometimes have different precision formats e.g. 10.0 vs 10.00. To that end, I created the following subroutine. However, that raised two questions for me: 1. Does this make sense. Is there a better way? 2. Is there a CPAN module out there for doing this type of field-by-field checking (essentially column by column for a particular row)? I searched, but alas could find nothing suitable. 
use Scalar::Util(looks_like_number);

sub comp {
    my ($a, $b) = @_;
    if (looks_like_number($a) && looks_like_number($b)) {
        return ($a == $b);
    }
    else {
        return ($a eq $b);
    }
}

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In reply to Equality checking for strings AND numbers by Anonymous Monk

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