in reply to Re: japhygesis
in thread japhygesis

Nice, too few people realise that you can just return a string to evaluate as zero, but still be true. I often return things like "0 but true" when I want the 0 value to be true; that way you can return 0 on errors too. A little trick I picked up was if you need to print the value, you can just use "0\0" It's 0 plus the null character, so it's true, but it only prints 0.

The 15 year old, freshman programmer,
Stephen Rawls

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(tye)Re: japhygesis
by tye (Sage) on Jun 24, 2001 at 10:10 UTC 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
print 0+"0 but true",$/;
print 0+"0\0",$/;
__END__
Argument "0" isn't numeric in addition (+) at - line 3
0
0

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    Not only does it generate warnings, but they are confusing warnings. I'd probably use "00" over "0\0" if you wanted something that printed out nicer. (:

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
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