Hello, fellow monks;

I've gotten some strange results for some code I'm writing. I've made a short test case which I hope somebody can explain the results of to me.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @arr = ('one', 'apple', 'two', 'apple', 'three');


my $var;
my $matches = 0;
foreach my $el (@arr) {
    (defined($var) ? $var .= 'y' : $var .= 'n') if $el eq 'apple';
    $matches++ if $el eq 'apple';
}
print "$var\n";
print "$matches\n";

$var = 'x';
$matches = 0;
foreach my $el (@arr) {
    (defined($var) ? $var .= 'y' : $var .= 'n') if $el eq 'apple';
    $matches++ if $el eq 'apple';
}
print "$var\n";
print "$matches\n";

[download]
Output: 
nyn
2
xynyn
2

[download]

Nevermind rewriting the code bringing the assignment/appending operator outside of the comparison. I would like to know why this specific code prints such strange results (I would expect 'ny' for the former and 'xyy' for the latter fragment).

I understand '=' and '.=' can return something, but I don't understand how it gets assigned back to $var or why the non-matching part of the conditional gets executed.

What am I missing here?

In reply to strange output from conditional operator by december

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