in reply to Whatever happened to chomp?
2 is a number, and perl is trying to DWYM with the numerical compare (==). Try putting
one two three four
in __DATA__, and
change the conditional to if ($data eq '2'). Now see what effect chomp has...
Update: Struck out the data section and added bit about numerical compare to the first sentence. I shouldn't have included the red herring (one, two, three). The original point was supposed to be that perl will treat a variable like a number in numerical context (== instead of eq).
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