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

How do I force PERL to see "0" as a string I believe that it is seeing it as a number. Is there like a parsestring($foo) or something?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Changing a number to a string
by jepri (Parson) on Jan 25, 2001 at 22:14 UTC
    You don't have to worry about that, Perl does it for you.
    If you use a numerical compare:

    if ($var == 0 )

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    it'll be a number.

    If you use a string compare:

    if ($var eq "0")

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    then it'll be a string.

    This actually took me quite a long time to get the hang of, sadly.

    ____________________
    Jeremy
    I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

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Re: Changing a number to a string
by davorg (Chancellor) on Jan 25, 2001 at 22:12 UTC

    (it's "Perl" not "PERL")

    Can you give us a bit more context. Like a smallest test case sample of code. Perl normally does the Right Thing in cases like these, but it'll be easier to see what's going on with a snippet of code.

    --
    <http://www.dave.org.uk>

    "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
    and the boring jobs bearable" - me

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Re: Changing a number to a string
by jynx (Priest) on Jan 26, 2001 at 05:01 UTC

    wow

    i'm amazed no one's brought up merlyn's solution yet:

    
"$_ is string\n" if (~$_ & $_) ne '0';

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    This is taken verbatim from Effective Perl Programming. Not sure if it will work correctly when dealing with a "0" string, but it's worth testing (give me a couple minutes :)

    jynx

    Update:that's cool! if you declare:

    my $string = "0";
my $num    = 0;

# then we:

print "string: $string is a string.\n" if ((~$string & $string) ne '0'
+);

print "num: $num is a string.\n" if ((~$num & $num) ne '0');

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    Notice it only outputs the one that looked like a string. That merlyn's a genius.

    For more information on why this works read page 248 of Effective Perl Programming...

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Re: Changing a number to a string
by CiceroLove (Monk) on Jan 26, 2001 at 01:40 UTC
    Easiest thing I do is just: 
    $foo = 0 . "";

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    This makes Perl kick in with the Right Thing. In converse, you can also 
    $foo = "2345" + 0;

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Re: Changing a number to a string
by dsb (Chaplain) on Jan 25, 2001 at 23:13 UTC
    It could also have something to do with the way you initialize it. 
    # initializing like this will represent '0' as a number
$foo = 0;

# by double quoting it, the '0' should be seen as a string
$foo = "0";

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    - kel -
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      How would you know if it's being seen as a string or a number, though? Because once you try to test that, Perl will just Do The Right Thing anyway.

      $foo = 0; # Declaring as a number
if ($foo eq '0') {
    print "Oops, it's a string!\n";
}

$foo = "0"; # Declaring as a string
if ($foo == 0) {
    print "Oops, now it's a number!\n";
}

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      Bottom line: Perl will always Do The Right Thing when it comes to worrying about stringifying numbers or number-fying strings.

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        FYI, I think the "standard" hack for seeing if a scalar has been used in a string context is ^, but it isn't a very good hack.

        I mean to write a module that exposes what types of values a scalar already has cached as well as nifty calls like looks_like_number().

                - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
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