Perl | Boolean Values

In most of the programming language True and False are considered as the boolean values. But Perl does not provide the type boolean for True and False. In general, a programmer can use the term “boolean” when a function returns either True or False. Like conditional statements(if, while, etc.) will return either true or false for the scalar values.

Example:

Perl

# Perl Code to demonstrate the boolean values

# variable assigned value 0
$k = 0;

# checking whether k is true or false
if ($k)
{
    print "k is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "k is False\n";
}

# variable assigned value 2
$m = 2;

# checking whether m is true or false
if ($m)
{
    print "m is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "m is False\n";
}

Output:

k is False
m is True

True Values: Any non-zero number i.e. except zero are True values in the Perl language. String constants like ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘ ‘(string having space as the character), ’00’(2 or more 0 characters) and “0\n”(a zero followed by a newline character in string) etc. also consider true values in Perl.

• Example:

Perl

# Perl Code to demonstrate the True values

# variable assigned value 5
$a = 5;

# checking whether a is true or false
if ($a)
{
    print "a is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "a is False\n";
}

# string variable assigned white
# space character
$b = ' ';

# checking whether b is true or false
if ($b)
{
    print "b is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "b is False\n";
}

# string variable assigned 'false'
# value to it
$c = 'false';

# checking whether c is true or false
if ($c)
{
    print "c is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "c is False\n";
}

# string variable assigned "0\n"
# value to it
$d = "0\n";

# checking whether d is true or false
if ($d)
{
    print "d is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "d is False\n";
}

Output:

a is True
b is True
c is True
d is True

False Values: Empty string or string contains single digit 0 or undef value and zero are considered as the false values in perl.

• Example:

Perl

# Perl Code to demonstrate the False values

# variable assigned value 0
$a = 0;

# checking whether a is true or false
if ($a)
{
    print "a is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "a is False\n";
}

# string variable assigned empty string
$b = '';

# checking whether b is true or false
if ($b)
{
    print "b is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "b is False\n";
}

# string variable assigned undef
$c = undef;

# checking whether c is true or false
if ($c)
{
    print "c is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "c is False\n";
}

# string variable assigned ""
# value to it
$d = "";

# checking whether d is true or false
if ($d)
{
    print "d is True\n";
}
else
{
    print "d is False\n";
}

Output:

a is False
b is False
c is False
d is False

Note: For the conditional check where the user has to compare two different variables, if they are not equal it returns False otherwise True.

• Example:

Perl

# Perl Program demonstrate the conditional check

# variable initialized with string
$x = "GFG";

# using if statement
if ($x eq "GFG")
{
    print "Return True\n";
}
else
{
    print "Return False\n";
}

Output:

Return True