In PHP, 0 (int, zero) is equal to “first” or “last” (strings)?

Question

I\'m confused by something I just ran into in a script I was working on. I had the following:

function getPart($part)
{
    $array = array(\'a\', \'b\', \'c\');         


        

Answer 1

PHP is a bit strange in that it treats a string in numeric comparison as 0. You can force string comparison by quoting the variables:

function getPart($part)
{
    $array = array('a', 'b', 'c');
    if ("$part" == 'first') $part = 0;
    if ("$part" == 'last') $part = count($array) - 1;
    if (isset($array[$part])) return $array[$part];
    return false;
}