G'day rammohan,

I recommend you read "perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl". You'll find links to more detailed documentation throughout that page.

The "Conditional and looping constructs" section will explain the syntax issues with your posted code.

You also have a problem with the condition "($length = 8)". '=' is the assignment operator; here you want '==' which is the numerical comparison operator. These, and other operators, are described in the "Builtin operators and functions" section.

I suspect the example code you were attempting should have looked more like this: 

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = 'perl_script';
my $length = length $str;

if ($str eq 'perl_script') {
    print 'Strings are the same.';

    if ($length == 8) {
        print 'Length is exactly 8.';
    }
    elsif ($length > 8) {
        print 'Length is more than 8.';
    }
    else {
        print 'Length is less than 8.';
    }
}
else {
    print 'Strings are different.';
}

[download]

Output:

Strings are the same.
Length is more than 8.

[download]

Also note that I haven't used the '-w' switch, but I have used the '-l' switch. Both of these are explained in "perlrun - how to execute the Perl interpreter".

-- Ken

In reply to Re: Perl If and Elsif statement help by kcott
in thread Perl If and Elsif statement help by rammohan

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.