Wise and great monks, I know you'll put me on the right path to enlightenment. I'm sure I'm overlooking something simple. I have a text menu where you select an option by number. If you select an $answer >= 4 it loops just fine back to the menu options, but if the user just hits the "Enter" key it errors out. This line sort of works, if ( $answer >= 4 || $answer eq "" ), I still get a warning, but it does loop and print the menu again. Also, I've tried the following pieces of code in different parts of my code, but no success:

$answer =~ s/\s+$//g;
$answer =~ tr/\015//d;
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Below is my code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $x = 0;
my $answer;
my %menu_selection = (
     '1' => "Option 1....",
     '2' => "Option 2....",
     '3' => "Option 3...."
);

sub menu () {
print STDOUT <<EOF;
Please select one of the following locations:
1.) Option 1....
2.) Option 2....
3.) Option 3....
EOF

print "\nSelection: ";
chomp( $answer = <STDIN> );
}

while ( $x == 0 ) {
     &menu;
     if ( %menu_selection ) {
          if ( $answer >= 4 || $answer eq "" ) {
               print "The menu selection is: $answer\n";
               print "\nWrong selection, please make a different selec
+tion.\n\n";
               $x = 0;
          } else {
               print "$menu_selection{$answer}\n";
               $x = 1;
          }
     }
}
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Should I assign a string or numeric value to $answer before making any reference to it? I know there is the "Term::Menu" module (which may simplify things), but I don't want to install it on a 1200+ nodes. Just FYI, the script runs on Linux only. Thank you in advance for any help!