... it skips the if in the foreach loop.

When I run your OPed code, I see that the  else (false) clause of the conditional statement is skipped, not the  if (true) clause, which is always executed.

The reason is that you are using a numeric  == comparison to test for string equality. You should use the  eq operator (see Equality Operators in perlop). Numeric comparisons of strings that have no leading decimal digits are always equal because such strings always evaluate to zero in numeric context.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"print 'A' == 'B';
"
Argument "B" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at -e line 1.
Argument "A" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at -e line 1.
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And BTW: using warnings would have alerted you to this problem, and using strict ain't a bad idea, either.