Question

I had the following in my code:

$mixed = array();
$mixed[0] = "It's a zero!";
$mixed['word'] = "It's a word!";   

foreach ($mixed as $key => $value) {
  if ($key == 'word') {             
    echo $value.'<br />';
  } 
}

The above would for some reason print both “It’s a zero!” and “It’s a word!”. I was expecting it to print only “It’s a word!”. Why is that?? I feel like I am missing something important. When I was using === in the if statement, it worked as expected, in other words it printed only “It’s a word!”. I know there’s a difference between the equal and identical operators, but the first example is not equal is it?

Answer 1

== does the type-conversion for you before comparison.

When you did an == with an integer 0, it converted 'word' into the appropriate integer value.

intval() returns 0 when supplied a pure-string, so 0 matched. The other was matched in string-context, and that matched as well.

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=== does no such implicit conversion, so it returned true only in one case, when the strings were actually identical.