Question

I need to cast a tweet id, which is a long, to a string. For instance, I have:

$id = 39685855740174336;

But var_dump($id) prints float(3.9685855740174E+16).

I tried to get the string value using strval():

var_dump(strval($id));

but I get string(19) "3.9685855740174E+16".

What I expect is:

string(17) "39685855740174336".

Any solutions?

Answer 1

This works for me (see the list of string format specifiers):

$string_id = sprintf('%.0f', $id);

Basically you treat it as a float, which in PHP it is, but ask sprintf() not to include any decimal places.