Why does PHP consider 0 to be equal to a string?

Question

I have the following piece of code:

$item[\'price\'] = 0;
/* Code to get item information goes in here */
if($item[\'price\'] == \'e\') {
    $item[\'price\'         


        

Answer 1

There's a rather handy method in PHP for validating a mix of "0", "false", "off" as == false and "1", "on", "true" as == true which is often overlooked. It's particularly useful for parsing GET/POST arguments:

filter_var( $item['price'], FILTER_VALIDATE_BOOLEAN );

It's not wholy relevant to this use-case but given the similarity and fact this is the result search tends to find when asking the question of validating (string)"0" as false I thought it would help others.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/filter.filters.validate.php