I was asking myself if it's possible to cast a string to become another type defined before
e.g.
$type = "int";
$foo = "5";
$bar = ($type) $foo;
and where $bar === 5
2 Answers
Yes, there's a built-in function for that:
$type = "int";
$foo = "5";
settype($foo, $type); // $foo is now the int 5
Note that the return value of settype() is the success state of the operation, and not the converted variable. Thanks to @NRVM below.
Documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/function.settype.php
1 Comment
Jackh4l
Yet you can turn a
string into a boolean, so this approach is not very clean... Still looking for a way to do it with a correct error returned if casting really fails.Taking the above comment, setting a variable will not return the number but a boolean for the succes state.
<?php
$type = "int";
$foo = "5";
$bar = settype($foo, $type);
var_dump($foo);
// bool(true)
// $bar = 1
settype($foo, $type);
var_dump($foo);
// int(5)
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