All to often I find myself struggling with the way Perl treats 0 as a character/string

I find that when I have a string that is just "0" instead of using:

 if($string)

I need to use 

 if (defined($string))
or 
if(length($string))

[download]

And no matter how many times I do data file processing where '0' is a valid entry, I always have to come back and put in one of those fixes to properly deal with the '0'

am I an idiot or is this a common issue that I should be handling differently?

In reply to methods for dealing with zero '0' as a string or char by boleary

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