Question

I’ve some problems with handling Boolean values in PHP. It is a validation script before storing data into database. I wrote a global validator that will validate and return a Boolean value whether the validation was successful .
Here is my code.

    //VALIDATE 
    $isValid = true;
    foreach($team as $key=>$val) {
        if(!is_array($val)){
            $isValid = $isValid && validate($val, $key);
        }
    }
    for($it=0;$it<count($team['members']);$it++){
        foreach($team['members'][$it] as $key=>$val) {
            $isValid = $isValid && validate($val, $key);
        }
    }

    if(!$isValid) { // EDITED: if(!isValid)
        echo "validation error";
        exit(1);
    }

    //END OF VALIDATE

The validate function is working properly but sometimes I end up getting $isValid = true or the other way, when I try with some test cases.
Hmm.. What am I doing wrong here ?

Answer 1

Please check, if this form does the trick:

if( false === $isValid) {

    echo "validation error";
    exit(1);

}

Note, that ( ! $isValid ) or (false == $isValid ) in some cases return results, which are at first look wrong. See for example the hint in the strpos() documentation.

In fact, the results are fine, since operations line ! or == try to cast operands in a ‘useful’ way.

That said, it’s always better to user the === operator, since it checks values and types of operands. Please see operator overview.