Question

In the following I tried $code = (string)$code; with no success, how can I convert number to string in PHP?

$code = 087326487326;
$strlen = strlen($code);
print $strlen."<br/>";
for ($i = $strlen; $i >= 0; $i--) {
  print substr($code, 0, $i)."<br/>";
}

Output:

1
0

and

$code = '087326487326';
$strlen = strlen($code);
print $strlen."<br/>";
for ($i = $strlen; $i >= 0; $i--) {
  print substr($code, 0, $i)."<br/>";
}

Output:

12
087326487326
08732648732
0873264873
087326487
08732648
0873264
087326
08732
0873
087
08
0

Answer 1

It’s failing because it’s prefixed with a 0, making PHP attempt to interpret it as an octal number, where 8 is not a valid octal digit as it parses the string, so you get 0.

The solution is to use a (string) cast or strval(), but you need to remove the leading zero from your definition of $code.

$code = 87326487326;
var_dump( $code, (string) $code, strval( $code));

This will output (on an x64 machine):

int(87326487326) string(11) "87326487326" string(11) "87326487326"