ITEC 325 2015fall ibarland

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php-types
php's slippery types

review project

summary

• Call error_reporting(E_ALL);, in every file.
• Use === (and, !==) to compare, in php.
• The functions is_numeric, is_string, etc. are ones you actually want to use regularly (rather than type-casts, explicit or implicit).

There are some things that are not an error, but should be. For example: echo $iNeverDefinedThisVariable + 47; or echo $notAnArray[9+$notAnIndex] + 47; or echo strlen(heyThisHasNoQuotesSoIsNotReallyAString);.

This means that if you ever mis-type a variable name, you won't get an error, but instead PHP will happily proceed as if nothing is wrong¹.
PHP does not have your back.

Solution: Fortunately, people figured out that PHP's default behavior is unforgiveable, and added a switch to turn the above three behaviours into errors, as they should be: error_reporting(E_ALL);. Put this line at the top of all your PHP files, and save hours of headaches later.

Types in php

PHP does have different types (including the standard booleans, ints, floats, strings, and arrays). However, it often plays exceedingly fast-and-loose with them — “type juggling” — which might makes it seem like PHP doesn't know about types.

Conversion between strings and integers:

echo "hello" + "world";
echo 12 + 3;
echo "12" + "3";
echo "12" + 3;
echo "12hello" + "3world7" + "nevermind92";

echo strlen(37);
     

Rationale:

The solution: If you have a string, use is_numeric along with type casting.

Booleans: Many values, if used in a boolean context, are "false-ish":

echo false == false;
echo false == 0;
echo false == 0.0;
echo false == "0";
echo false == array();
echo $someUndefinedVar == false;   // ?!
    

// == is not transitive (!):
echo 0 == "00";
echo false == "00";        // false?!

echo 0 == "-0";
echo false == "-0";        // false?!

echo 0 == 0.0;
echo false == "0.0";       // false?!
    

Upshot: PHP has ===, which does comparison suppressing any type-casts. Using this avoids unexpected results; when you want to convert you can call functions explicitly. So, for this class (and in all php), use === (and, !==) to compare, in php. Sure, you'll see examples on the web and in books that use ==, but that's just asking for trouble.

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©2015, Ian Barland, Radford University Last modified 2015.Sep.11 (Fri)

Please mail any suggestions (incl. typos, broken links) to ibarlandradford.edu