What is the proper way to check if a string is empty in Perl?

Question

I\'ve just been using this code to check if a string is empty:

if ($str == \"\")
{
  // ...
}

And also the same with the not equals operato

Answer 1

1. Due to the way that strings are stored in Perl, getting the length of a string is optimized.
   if (length $str) is a good way of checking that a string is non-empty.

2. If you're in a situation where you haven't already guarded against undef, then the catch-all for "non-empty" that won't warn is if (defined $str and length $str).