Question

I have a table contacts that has a field arrayOfMembers (JSON format) and a table users with field userId (int).

$recipientId=getUserIdForEmail($recipientEmail);
addUserIdToContactsMemberIds($noteId, $recipientId);

function addUserIdToContactsMemberIds($noteId, $userId)
     {
          $memberData=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE contactId='$contactId'");
          $memberResultData = mysql_fetch_assoc($memberData);
          $arrayOfMemberIds=json_decode($memberResultData['arrayOfMembers']);
          $arrayOfMemberIds[]=$userId;
          $sendback=json_encode($arrayOfMemberIds);
          mysql_query("UPDATE notes SET arrayOfMembers='$sendback' where contactId='$contactId'");
     }

function getUserIdForEmail($email)
    {
         $data=mysql_query("SELECT userId FROM users WHERE userEmail='$email'");
         $result = mysql_fetch_assoc($data);
         return $result["userId"];
    }

However, the $userId is being stored as a string with quotations, so that where if I originally have [1], after adding a new userId, it looks like this [1,”2″] even though it should look like [1,2].

If I manually enter an int value in the line: $arrayOfMemberIds[]=$userId; and put $arrayOfMemberIds[]=5, then I get the correct result, that is [1,5]. Why is this happening?

Answer 1

If you have an issue with the ID being a string (in most cases, it isn’t a big deal), then simply use intval():

$arrayOfMemberIds[] = intval($userId);

or

return intval($result["userId"]);

Why’s it a string?

mysql_fetch_assoc returns all values as a string, regardless of the type in the database. Straight from PHP documentation:

Returns an associative array of strings that corresponds to the fetched row, or FALSE if there are no more rows. – http://php.net/mysql_fetch_assoc