Why are these 2 strings equal?

JackDno7 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm writing a script that takes as the input the name of a city, and then matches it to a field in a data file to get the proper output. Two of the cities I deal with are Evansville and South Bend. When I compare them using the eq comparator, they don't match (as they shouldn't). But when I use the == comparator, the output says they are equal. Why is that?

Comment on Why are these 2 strings equal?

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Re: Why are these 2 strings equal? by bikeNomad (Priest) on Jun 09, 2001 at 02:17 UTC
Because when you use == the strings are converted to numbers. And both these strings equal 0 when converted to numbers. And 0 == 0.	[reply]
Re: Why are these 2 strings equal? by japhy (Canon) on Jun 09, 2001 at 01:44 UTC
Because `==` is for numbers. Use `eq`. Read some documentation (perlop).	[reply]
Re: Why are these 2 strings equal? by marcink (Monk) on Jun 10, 2001 at 00:47 UTC
Because you don't use '-w' that would warn you about type mismatch. Use it (together with 'use strict;' and save yourself a lot of hassle. -mk	[reply]