I think he was wondering why, when input a value of "1", at the terminal, it wasn't matching his data value.

I don't think he was trying to handle cases asking for the answer of everything -- just trying to get a basic understanding of why his test case wasn't working, in what would seem to many new perl programmers, to be such a simple case! And who among us haven't been bitten by that simple newline more than once! :-)