PHP die() vs. echo

Question

Can anyone please tell me why line 1 works (returns 35434), but line 2 doesn't (returns blank)?

1. echo $_FILES['userfile']['size'];
2. die ($_FILES['userfile']['size']);

Thanks!

Answer 1

die is equivalent to exit and you'll notice that exit takes either an integer or a string as an argument. In the case you pass an integer, then the program exits and returns that integer as its exit code.

$_FILES['userfile']['size'] is an integer, not a string, so instead of outputting the message to the screen, it returns the size as the return code of the program.

A simple solution is to concatenate to an empty string to let the PHP compiler you want a string instead of an integer:

die('' . $_FILES['userfile']['size']);

Answer 2

I answered this a few hours ago, anyway the other answers are right.

As a workaround (if you need to do that), casting the integer to a string will do the trick:

die(strval($_FILES['userfile']['size'])); // or
die((string) $_FILES['userfile']['size']);