Question

This may be a stupid question but I might aswell as it 🙂

is there away to force

$tel1 = '05';// string
settype($tel1,'string');
$tel1 = 06;//either throw error, or convert it to string automatically.
var_dump($tel1);//(string [2]) 05

The above code is of the top of my head so might not be accurate but I need to keep a variable as a string not numeric, because of some silly thing I have done, now my phone numbers lose the leading 0s 🙁

n I cn’t rewrite it because it will mess up with other numeric types,b4 u ask it was an automated service for db to check if it was a numeric value or not,

UPDATE
This is the problem

function escape($str){
   if(is_numeric($str)){
       return $str;
   }else{
       return "'".mysql_real_escape_string($str).'\'';
   }
}
$tel1 = "06";
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM blabla WHERE id = '.escape($tel1).'';
//above is same as below
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM blabla WHERE id = 06 ';

I can’t change anything inside the scape function because other inputes thruout the website are using this function, I dont wanna mess their validations.

Answer 1

Your use of is_numeric tests for numeric content, not an integer type. But then you take a variable called $str which implies you want it to be a string.

Perhaps use:

function escape($val) {
   if (is_numeric($val) && !is_string($val)) {
       return $val;
   }
   else{
       return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string($val) . '\'';
   }
}

Now strings will be escaped and quoted, but not if they contain only numeric content.