If you get the strings like you say are there, then you can use them as numbers. In Perl, you don't have to call a function to convert a string to a number, if that string is a number, you can just use it like one. Here I just added 10 to the "string" to show that feature. Of course once "$string" is a "number", leading zero'es are suppressed unless you use some kind of printf statement to add them back into the printout. A common idiom to suppress leading zeroes is $number_string+=0;
#!usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my @input = qw /0001144204-09-017358
0001144204-10-065610
0001042167-15-000175
0000053669-16-000051 /;
foreach my $string (@input)
{
$string =~ tr/-//d;
print "string = $string\n";
print "string +10 as number: ", $string + 10,"\n";
}
__END__
prints:
string = 000114420409017358
string +10 as number: 114420409017368
string = 000114420410065610
string +10 as number: 114420410065620
string = 000104216715000175
string +10 as number: 104216715000185
string = 000005366916000051
string +10 as number: 5366916000061
Update: I ran this on Win XP, 32 bit.
normally, 2,147,483,647 would be max int, but Perl 5.22 was able to get 104,216,715,000,185 from the addition.
