Ivan Heffner wrote: > Use Perl's short-circuiting logical '||' > to make a single method call (or set of method calls): > > foreach my $family ( $cartoon->families() ) { > if ( ( $cartoon->$family->husband() || '' ) eq 'fred') { > print "yes\n"; > } > } Or even: ( $cartoon->$family->husband() // '' ) eq 'fred'