Answer by Dave Sherohman for In Perl, how can I concisely check if a $variable is defined and contains a non zero length string?

How about

if (length ($name || '')) {  # do something with $name}

This isn't quite equivalent to your original version, as it will also return false if $name is the numeric value 0 or the string '0', but will behave the same in all other cases.

In perl 5.10 (or later), the appropriate approach would be to use the defined-or operator instead:

use feature ':5.10';if (length ($name // '')) {  # do something with $name}

This will decide what to get the length of based on whether $name is defined, rather than whether it's true, so 0/'0' will handle those cases correctly, but it requires a more recent version of perl than many people have available.