String compare on a bool

Question

I'm pretty sure this is a simple fundamental flaw in my newb PHP knowledge, but I was surprised when the following happened:

$result is TRUE... so why is it considered equal to the string "email"? I'm guessing this is because, technically, it's a bool and it isn't false? So when it's compared against a string (e.g. "email") it returns true.

Should I change my method to return as the result as a string containing "true" (instead of return true; on success), or is there another way I should be doing this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, true is equal (==) to a non-empty string. Not identical (===) though.

I suggest you peruse the type comparison table.

Answer 2

It returns true because php will try to convert something to be able to compare them. In this case it probably tries to convert the string on the right side to a bool which will be true in this case. And true == true is ofcourse true.

By doing $result === "email" (triple =) you tell PHP that it shoudn't do conversions and should return false if the types don't match.