Question

I’m sending a PHP script data converted from JSON into serialised form by JQuery (see http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/). PHP interprets the POST data as one big associative array, which is awesome.

What I’m wondering is, is it possible to cast to a boolean array in PHP? And generally, whether you can cast to a typed array in PHP?

At the moment I have an array of booleans in JavaScript which is interpreted as an array of string in PHP. I’m guessing you can’t cast in that way, as a PHP array can contain a mix of types?

Answer 1

Are you saying, you want to convert to something like:

array('TRUE', 'FALSE', 'TRUE', 'TRUE', 'FALSE');

to

array(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE);

?

Then, you could use something like this:

$a = array('TRUE', 'FALSE', 'TRUE', 'TRUE', 'FALSE');

function _str_to_bool($s) {
  return strtolower($s) == 'true';
}

$a2 = array_map('_str_to_bool', $a));

var_export($a2);
// array(true, false, true, true, false)

If you want to perform a “real” cast, instead (so, a string will evaluate to false only if == “”), just change the code in the callback function, to do a cast ((bool)$s in this case), or whatever you need.