How to prompt for input and exit if the user entered an empty string?

Question

I\'m new to Perl and I\'m writing a program where I want to force the user to enter a word. If the user enters an empty string then the program should exit.

This is

Answer 1

You're almost there.

print "Enter a word to look up: ";
my $userword = <STDIN>; # I moved chomp to a new line to make it more readable
chomp $userword; # Get rid of newline character at the end
exit 0 if ($userword eq ""); # If empty string, exit.

Answer 2

File output is buffered by default. Since the prompt is so short, it is still sitting in the output buffer. You can disable buffering on STDOUT by adding this line of code before printing...

select((select(STDOUT), $|=1)[0]);