Assignment inside Perl ternary conditional operator problems

Question

This snippet of Perl code in my program is giving the wrong result.

$condition ? $a = 2 : $a = 3 ;
print $a;

No matter what the value of

Answer 1

Once you have an inkling that you might be suffering from precedence problems, a trick to figure out what Perl thought you meant:

perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e '$condition ? $a= 2 : $a= 3 ; print $a;'

In your case, that'll show you:

(($condition ? ($a = 2) : $a) = 3);
print($a);
-e syntax OK

...at which point you should be saying "oh, that explains it"!