Question

In PHP, is there any difference between the != and <> operators?

In the manual, it states:

$a != $b    Not equal   TRUE if $a is not equal to $b after type juggling.
$a <> $b    Not equal   TRUE if $a is not equal to $b after type juggling.

I guess there are no huge differences but I’m curious.

Answer 1

In the main Zend implementation there is not any difference. You can get it from the Flex description of the PHP language scanner:

<ST_IN_SCRIPTING>"!="|"<>" {
    return T_IS_NOT_EQUAL;
}

Where T_IS_NOT_EQUAL is the generated token. So the Bison parser does not distinguish between <> and != tokens and treats them equally:

%nonassoc T_IS_EQUAL T_IS_NOT_EQUAL T_IS_IDENTICAL T_IS_NOT_IDENTICAL
%nonassoc '<' T_IS_SMALLER_OR_EQUAL '>' T_IS_GREATER_OR_EQUAL