Seems like ne "" is what I was looking for. :)

The !! construct won't work because certain strings with lengths can be false: 

marvin@smokey:~ $ perl -le 'print "true" if !!"0";'
marvin@smokey:~ $ perl -le 'print "true" if !!"1";'
true

[download]

What did you mean by "premature", though?

In reply to Re^2: Alternative to bytes::length() by creamygoodness
in thread Alternative to bytes::length() by creamygoodness

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