Standard form

[Anonymous Monk]

very newbie question sorry! I've written a script which reads numbers from a text file so far no problem as perl is clever enough to know they're numbers some of these numbers are expressed in standard form as for example 5.13E-04 always like that E - digit digit do i need to write a function to convert to a number or is there one built in i've been scouring the perl cd bookshelf and can't find one

[splinky]

Perl natively recognizes scientific notation, so you shouldn't have to do anything.

[Bukowski]

If you want to find the right document for how Perl handles numbers etc. you should check out "perldoc perlnumber" or look at it on-line: here

[dorko]

I think you can't find anything because Perl is smart enough to "Do What You Mean" (tm).

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my ($number1, $number2, $number3) = <DATA>;

my $number = 5.13E-04;
my $other = "5.13E-04";

print "sum 1 = ", $number + $other;
print "\n";
print "sum 2 = ", $number1 + $number2 + $number3;

__DATA__
5.12E-04
5.12E+04
1

Results:

sum 1 = 0.001026
sum 2 = 51201.000512

Cheers,

Brent

[Anonymous Monk]

aye it does thanks! i thought perl would be clever enough but when my script didn't give the answers i'd been asured where right i assumed that it was the way the standard form was written actually the right numbers are wrong! thanks though