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Postings from March 2022
On 2022-03-11 1:19 p.m., William Lindley 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. What do you mean by "a file"? Context is everything. Of course we would expect different behaviors depending on the type of the file, where the postal code is in the file, whether or not it is quoted, and so on. In the general case of a generic file read using generic file operations, your line would be read as a character string, and all the characters would be preserved. You would only lose the leading zero if you were reading the file with something that was treating it as JSON or some other special format, or if you fed the line to a mathematical operation like adding zero to it. I don't see a problem here. What is an example scenario where you think Perl would do the wrong thing with your postal code? -- Darren DuncanThread Previous | Thread Next