The way you're using regex's won't get you what you want. /[a-z]+/i will match a string with one or more upper and lower case letters (in a weird way, but it works) but there's lots of other characters in the world than just A-Z and "numbers." If $a="%_!@" your code will proudly proclaim that $a is "numeric" which it isn't, at least for my definition of numeric. :-D

If what you want to do is distinguish between letters and numbers, you might try:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $a = "aBcdeFG";

if ($a =~ /[A-Za-z]/) {   # No i modifier needed
    print "Alphabet\n";
}
elsif ($a =~ /\d/) {     # \d matches 0-9 only
    print "Numeric\n";
}
else {
     print "Non-numeric, non-alphabet\n";
}
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Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer