An easier way to test for the ASCII character 12 is to use a regex:

if ($line =~ m/\014/) {
  # $line contains a Control-L
}
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Update: I guess your approach can work, but it's a little awkward. You are comparing the octal representation of a number (which is a string) to a decimal value. Doing it your way I would have written it:

$test = sprintf("%o", ord $_);
if ($test eq "14") {
  ...
}
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