Why are these 2 strings equal?

[JackDno7]

I'm writing a script that takes as the input the name of a city, and then matches it to a field in a data file to get the proper output. Two of the cities I deal with are Evansville and South Bend. When I compare them using the eq comparator, they don't match (as they shouldn't). But when I use the == comparator, the output says they are equal. Why is that?

[bikeNomad]

Because when you use == the strings are converted to numbers. And both these strings equal 0 when converted to numbers. And 0 == 0.

[japhy]

Because == is for numbers. Use eq. Read some documentation (perlop).

[marcink]

Because you don't use '-w' that would warn you about type mismatch. Use it (together with 'use strict;' and save yourself a lot of hassle.

-mk