Dear Perl Monks,
I am currently in the process of writing a custom "diff" utility for comparing two text files field-by-field, for reasons that I will omit here.
One thing I need to do is generic equality checking - use "==" for numeric comparisons, and "eq" for strings, since the fields contain different data types, and sometimes have different precision formats e.g. 10.0 vs 10.00.
To that end, I created the following subroutine. However, that raised two questions for me:
1. Does this make sense. Is there a better way?
2. Is there a CPAN module out there for doing this type of field-by-field checking (essentially column by column for a particular row)? I searched, but alas could find nothing suitable.
use Scalar::Util(looks_like_number);
sub comp {
my ($a, $b) = @_;
if (looks_like_number($a) && looks_like_number($b)) {
return ($a == $b);
}
else {
return ($a eq $b);
}
}
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