fetching an Integer from DB using Zend Framework returns the value as a string

Question

When I run an sql query using the ZF wrappers, all the numeric values return as strings. What do I need to change so the values will return in the same data type as they are in the DB?

Answer 1

I implemented a lot of the Zend_Db code in Zend Framework.

As other have stated, the reason that Zend_Db returns strings instead of native PHP integers or floats is that PHP's database extensions return strings. And the reason for that is that there might be no native PHP type to represent certain database type.

For example, MySQL's BIGINT is a 64-bit signed integer. By default, the PHP int type is limited to 32-bit values, so if you fetch data from the database and implicitly convert it to int, some values might be truncated. There are several other similar cases, for float and dates, etc.

Using the string representation for all data types is the best way to remain simple and consistent, be safe about avoiding data loss, and avoid writing lots of vendor-specific special-case code to do data type mapping. That extra code would incur a performance penalty, too.

So if you have specific cases where you need database results to be mapped to native PHP data types, you should implement it yourself in your application code (e.g. in a custom Zend_Db_Table_Row class).

Answer 2

Databases typically return result sets as text. Unless your db adaptor converts things for you (and to sounds like yours does not), all values will come back as strings--dates, enums, etc. as well as integers.

If you are dealing with a small number of tables with only a few integer fields, just hand convert them. If you are dealing with a slightly more complex situation, you could iterate through the columns using the database definitions (see sqlite_fetch_column_types(), etc.). If your situation is more complex than seems reasonable for these solutions, consider switching to a more featureful framework.