PHP Strict Casts

Strict type casting for super defensive PHP

Installation

$ composer require ntzm/strict-casts

Usage

This package provides the following strict casts:

• stringToBool
• intToBool
• stringToInt
• stringToFloat

And the following general casts, which work with any input, but use strict casts when they can:

• toBool
• toInt
• toFloat

All mentioned functions live under the namespace StrictCasts. This way, before using them, they have to be imported through the use function statement.

Why?

PHP's inbuilt type casting is not strict at all, and will take almost any type and turn it into another, no matter how valid the conversion is, for example:

(int) 'hello' === 0;
(int) '5 hello' === 5;
(int) 'hello 5' === 0;
(int) '123,456' === 123;

This is a source of a great number of bugs, headaches and crying.

By ensuring that the conversion is valid before conversion, we can ensure that the casting happens exactly as we would expect it to, or it will fail! For example:

use function StrictCasts\stringToInt;

stringToInt('123') === 123;
stringToInt('-123') === -123;

stringToInt('hello'); // throws exception
stringToInt('5 hello'); // throws exception
stringToInt('hello 5'); // throws exception
stringToInt('123,456'); // throws exception