In the cases where equality comparisons would give the same result as strict equality comparisons, which of the two should be used?

Question

To use an example, should it be $name == "John Doe" or $name === "John Doe"?

I'd guess that equality comparisons would perform worse as they would do some kind of type casting.

p.s. I know that the performance gain of choosing one over the other would be negligible, if any. It's a question of principle.

Answer 1

You don't really need to check for === in most of your code, if you carefully live with the fact that you're not using a strongly typed language, but that should be a constant think when you write PHP code.

I usually use ==, reserving === to what the PHP manual suggests (i.e. strpos() calls and similars).

Here's some empirical benchmarks I run. Maybe I should switch to === ;-)

$start = microtime(true);

for($i = 0; $i < 1000000; $i++) {
    if("1" === 1); 
}

$end = microtime(true);

echo number_format($end - $start,5,',','.') . " seconds";

// 0,06117 seconds for "thestring" === "thestring"
// 0,07601 seconds for "thestring" == "thestring"

// 0,05154 seconds for "1" === 1
// 0,09041 seconds for "1" == 1