how to check if a hash is empty in perl

Question

I use the following code to check if the hash is empty. Is there a better method and is this safe to use?

if (!keys %hash) { print \"Empty\";} 

Answer 1

Simpler:

if (!%hash) { 
    print "Empty";
} 

! imposes a scalar context, and hash evaluated in a scalar context returns:

• false if there are zero keys (not defined in the documentation but experimentally returns 0)

• A string signifying how many used/allocated buckets are used for >0 keys, which will of course be NOT false (e.g. "3/6")