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Postings from March 2022
On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 4:19 PM William Lindley <wlindley@wlindley.com> wrote: > In all this discussion, what happens when reading a file containing the > line: > > 01730 > > which is the postal code for my hometown. This "looks like" a number > but if treated like one, the leading zero is liable be dropped, leaving > invalid postcode > > 1730 > > In more-pathological cases, 01730 could be interpreted as an octal > number (984 decimal). > > It is disheartening that Perl's "be forgiving in what you accept; be > strict at what you output" is violated by so many newer protocols. > > Depends on how it is used in Perl syntax. If you write that as the literal value: `my $x = 01730;` then you have not assigned the zipcode, but an octal number. If you write it as a string: `my $x = '01730';` then it will be a string containing your intended zip code. Thus you must represent zipcodes as strings. Regardless, this is not very relevant to the proposed functions; if anything, they allow a serializer to avoid misrepresenting such a value, as long as you created it properly. -DanThread Previous | Thread Next