Question

I have a collegue who constantly assigns variable and forces their type. For example he would declare something like so:

$this->id = (int)$this->getId();

or when returning he will always return values as such:

return (int)$id;

I understand that php is a loosely typed language and so i am not asking what the casting is doing. I am really wondering what the benefits are of doing this – if any – or if he is just wasting time and effort in doing this?

Answer 1

There are a few benefits.

1. Type-checking. Without type-checking, 0 == false and 1 == true.
2. Sanitizing. If you’re inserting the value into an SQL query, you can’t have SQL injection because string values are converted to zero.
3. Integrity. It prevents inserting invalid database data. Again, it converts to zero, so you won’t be trying to insert a string into a integer field in a database.