I have confusion about a very simple issue. I am unable to completely understand this simple concepts of 'defined', undef, null strings in perl.

I tried to read a bit and was not sure. I wrote a snippet to explain to you my confusion.

my $y; if (defined $y) { print "Y is defined\n"; } else { print "Y is not defined\n"; } if ($y eq "") { print "Y is null string\n"; } else { print "Y is not null string\n"; }

The above gives me

Y is not defined Y is null string
Y is not defined and but it equates to a null string. How does the Perl concepts compare to a language like C. Thank you.

In reply to defined vs null string by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.