7stud:

My perspective is this: perl knows how to translate numeric strings such as "14" into a number. But if a string contains anything that doesn't look like a number, there's really no unambiguous way to ensure that it's converted to the correct number. Examples include:

• "" - zero seems like a fine value for this. But undef also seems reasonable.
• "one" - for some programs it would be nice if this converted to 1, for other programs it would be nice if it converted to 0.
• One of my favorites: "123 E 45th Street" could convert to 1.23E47, a rather large number.

So perl is simply telling you that it's going to convert something to a number, but since it doesn't look like a number, you may not get the value you want....

...roboticus

I really ought to make a better default signature so I don't have to delete the stupid last line on every post...