Question

I have a problem that I need to solve.

I have an associative array, eg:

private $formData = [
"lastPrintedNumber" => 0,
];

I obtain this data from a text file with a function…:

$line = fgets( $formDataFile );
$explodedLine = explode( ' ', $linea );
$this->formData[ 'lastPrintedNumber' ] = (int) $explodedLine[2];

It assigns the correct type, int, to $formData[ lastPrintdNumber ].

But I don’t want to hardcode the assignments, instead I want to do a foreach, looking for the right data in the array.

Example:

$line = fgets( $formDataFile ) ) != false ) {
$explodedLine = explode( ' ', $linea );
foreach( $this->formDatos as $key => $value ) {
    if( $explodedLine[0] == $key ) {
        $this->formData[ $key ] = $value;
    }
}

The problem is that it assigns the value as string, and in some case I need int for maths.

So I would need a way to stablish the data type for formData[ 'lastPrintedNumber' ] to always be int.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Just a small point: You should be using == in the if, not just =.

That aside, it doesn’t matter like it does in JavaScript. In JS, if you have a = "1"; b = "2"; alert(a+b) you get 12, but in PHP you get 3 because + expects numbers.

PHP’s type coercion solves almost all problems by itself, so there’s usually no need to specify a certain type.