Scalar values

Scalars aren't necessarily one thing or another. There's no place to declare a scalar variable to be of type ``string'', or of type ``number'', or type ``filehandle'', or anything else. Perl is a contextually polymorphic language whose scalars can be strings, numbers, or references (which includes objects). While strings and numbers are considered pretty much the same thing for nearly all purposes, references are strongly-typed uncastable pointers with builtin reference-counting and destructor invocation.

A scalar value is interpreted as TRUE in the Boolean sense if it is not the null string or the number 0 (or its string equivalent, ``0''). The Boolean context is just a special kind of scalar context.

There are actually two varieties of null scalars: defined and undefined. Undefined null scalars are returned when there is no real value for something, such as when there was an error, or at end of file, or when you refer to an uninitialized variable or element of an array. An undefined null scalar may become defined the first time you use it as if it were defined, but prior to that you can use the defined() operator to determine whether the value is defined or not.

To find out whether a given string is a valid nonzero number, it's usually enough to test it against both numeric 0 and also lexical ``0'' (although this will cause -w noises). That's because strings that aren't numbers count as 0, just as they do in awk:

    if ($str == 0 && $str ne "0")  {
        warn "That doesn't look like a number";
    }

That's usually preferable because otherwise you won't treat IEEE notations like NaN or Infinity properly. At other times you might prefer to use a regular expression to check whether data is numeric. See the perlre manpage for details on regular expressions.

    warn "has nondigits"        if     /\D/;
    warn "not a whole number"   unless /^\d+$/;
    warn "not an integer"       unless /^[+-]?\d+$/
    warn "not a decimal number" unless /^[+-]?\d+\.?\d*$/
    warn "not a C float"
        unless /^([+-]?)(?=\d|\.\d)\d*(\.\d*)?([Ee]([+-]?\d+))?$/;

The length of an array is a scalar value. You may find the length of array @days by evaluating $#days, as in csh. (Actually, it's not the length of the array, it's the subscript of the last element, because there is (ordinarily) a 0th element.) Assigning to $#days changes the length of the array. Shortening an array by this method destroys intervening values. Lengthening an array that was previously shortened NO LONGER recovers the values that were in those elements. (It used to in Perl 4, but we had to break this to make sure destructors were called when expected.) You can also gain some measure of efficiency by pre-extending an array that is going to get big. (You can also extend an array by assigning to an element that is off the end of the array.) You can truncate an array down to nothing by assigning the null list () to it. The following are equivalent:

    @whatever = ();
    $#whatever = -1;

If you evaluate a named array in a scalar context, it returns the length of the array. (Note that this is not true of lists, which return the last value, like the C comma operator.) The following is always true:

    scalar(@whatever) == $#whatever - $[ + 1;

Version 5 of Perl changed the semantics of $[: files that don't set the value of $[ no longer need to worry about whether another file changed its value. (In other words, use of $[ is deprecated.) So in general you can assume that

    scalar(@whatever) == $#whatever + 1;

Some programmers choose to use an explicit conversion so nothing's left to doubt:

    $element_count = scalar(@whatever);

If you evaluate a hash in a scalar context, it returns a value which is true if and only if the hash contains any key/value pairs. (If there are any key/value pairs, the value returned is a string consisting of the number of used buckets and the number of allocated buckets, separated by a slash. This is pretty much useful only to find out whether Perl's (compiled in) hashing algorithm is performing poorly on your data set. For example, you stick 10,000 things in a hash, but evaluating %HASH in scalar context reveals ``1/16'', which means only one out of sixteen buckets has been touched, and presumably contains all 10,000 of your items. This isn't supposed to happen.)