I'm reading in a tab delimited text file exported from Excel. The 12th "position" contains a simple 3 or 4 digit number. For some reason that number is coming in as a string, or something I'm not familiar with, and unusable as a number. This is from Dumper:

$VAR1 = [
          '1130',
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My database query was returning zip so I tested for the veracity of the uniq_id in line 78. The error is:

Argument "\01\01\03\00\0" isn't numeric in multiplication (*) at ./map
+tobuildforums.pl line 78.
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I did a hex dump and the number looks fine:

1130 = 31 31 33 30

Here's the code:

...
use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq);

open($fh, '<', 'filetoparse.txt') or die "error $!";
    chomp(my @lines = <$fh>);
close $fh;

my @old_ids;
foreach my $line (@lines) {
    @data = split(/\t/, $line);
    push @old_ids, $data[12];
}  

my @uniq_ids = uniq (@old_ids); #get unique ids
    
#step through unique ids for new id using old ids
for my $i (0..$#uniq_ids) {
    
    print $uniq_ids[$i] * 1;  #line 78 of my code to test for a number
    
    my $stmt = "SELECT * FROM temp_topics WHERE old_id = ?";
    my $topic = $dbh->selectrow_hashref($stmt, undef, $uniq_id[$i]);
    
    etc.
}
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Thoughts on how to handle this?