Zero being added when reading from filehandle?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I have a text file with a string of numbers: 1234 The file is named /tmp/count.out. I am trying to get my program to read the file and print out the string, but it is somehow affixing a zero before the string.

#!/usr/bin/perl

open (LASTCOUNT, "/tmp/count.out") || die "cannot open the file";
$line = <LASTCOUNT>;
close(LASTCOUNT);

print $line;
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The output is 01234. Where is the preceding 0 coming from? TIA.

Comment on Zero being added when reading from filehandle? Download Code

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Re: Zero being added when reading from filehandle? by Eimi Metamorphoumai (Deacon) on Dec 14, 2004 at 16:30 UTC
Cutting and pasting exactly from your posted code, I can't reproduce that. Are you absolutely certain that /tmp/count.out file doesn't already have the leading zero? The problem is somewhere in what you're not telling us.	[reply]
Re: Zero being added when reading from filehandle? by davido (Cardinal) on Dec 14, 2004 at 16:30 UTC
How is lastcount being added to the file in the first place? Is there a sprintf involved somewhere in that operation? Are you absolutely sure that there is not a zero in the file? Dave	[reply]
Re: Zero being added when reading from filehandle? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Dec 14, 2004 at 17:05 UTC
If the 0 is in the file, you can get rid of it by using `print 0+$line`. (Funny how adding a 0 removes a 0 grins. I suppose you could use `print $line-0` grins evilly.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Zero being added when reading from filehandle? by sgifford (Prior) on Dec 14, 2004 at 19:07 UTC
Maybe `count.out` doesn't have in it what you think it does? Try looking at it with `cat -vE`, which should show line endings and control characters; maybe you'll find a character you didn't expect.	[reply]