Question

I had an if statement similar to the following in my code and it took me forever to figure out what the problem was.

$a = 0;
if($a == 'something')
 {
 //this was being output when I didn't want it to be
 }

Using

$a = '0'; 

fixed it, but I don’t really know what’s going on here.

Answer 1

One’s a string, one’s an integer. PHP will translate between the two as needed, unless you’re using the ‘strict’ operators:

(0 == '0') // true
(0 === '0') // false (types don't match).

In your case, you’r comparing an integer 0 to a string ‘something’. PHP will convert the string ‘something’ to an integer. If there’s no digits in there at all, it’ll conver to an integer 0, which makes your comparison true.